Session Rules

At every session start Quack adds about 340 tokens of rules to Claude's context. In short:

• Be brief. No preamble, no recap, no restating the question.
• Read less. Check documentation/ first (INDEX.md, gotchas, decisions). Prefer Grep and a line range over whole files. Don't re-read a file already in context unless it changed.
• Route work by size. Short tasks stay in the chat; big ones go to the duck team. See Routing.
• One chat, one task. Suggest /clear when the user moves to an unrelated task, /compact at a natural pause, and offer to have Dante note where the work stopped first.
• Write down what was learned. After non-trivial work, Dante records it, so the next chat starts from the docs instead of a long history.

The same hook also adds:

• a pointer to documentation/INDEX.md when it exists, or a suggestion to run /quack:index in a git repo without one;
• on a fresh chat (not resumed or compacted), the last 10 lines of the newest diary file in documentation/diary/.

The rules live in scripts/session-start.mjs in the plugin source.