dossier-tradecraft

Slash commands and skills for Claude Code that extend dossier-mcp with opinionated workflows for research, design, project scoping, feature implementation, and vault context loading.

These workflows are an explicit add-on to dossier-mcp — they assume a Dossier-style vault and call dossier-mcp's tools throughout. Without that setup, nothing here works as a standalone tool.

Prerequisites

  • Claude Code
  • dossier-mcp, installed and registered as an MCP server
  • A vault following Dossier conventions:
    • profile.md at the vault root (the bootstrap document — see dossier-mcp's README for what goes in it)
    • An inbox/ directory
    • Project areas under projects/<project-slug>/

Install

git clone [email protected]:ethanaubuchon/dossier-tradecraft.git ~/workspace/dossier-tradecraft
cd ~/workspace/dossier-tradecraft
./install.sh

The installer symlinks commands/, skills/, and agents/ into ~/.claude/. Edits to the clone propagate immediately — no rebuild step. Set CLAUDE_DIR to override the default ~/.claude.

Commands shipped

Command What it does
/research [topic] Conversation-shaped research loop. Vault grounding → web research → agent-judged capture into the vault with citations.
/design [topic] Early-stage design exploration. Conversation-shaped dialog over a single living design note; required ## Approach section; re-entrant for refinement. Sits between /research and /scope.
/scope [topic] Project-level scoping. Refines a single living scope doc per project; re-entrant; required ## Unknowns section. Loads upstream design doc (if any exists) for context.
/decompose [topic] Feature/story breakdown. Consumes a ready-for-decompose scope doc and produces a task graph in the project's issue tracker (GitHub via gh, with vault fallback). Tracker is canonical; scope doc gets a ## Tracked at breadcrumb.
/implement [issue#] Feature implementation in a repo. Ticket-driven (issue# / spec-path / explicit ask) → repo-setup (branch + worktree) → approval-gated plan-file → develop-to-plan (own flow; no superpowers/TDD by default) → draft PR → agent-review loop with a human ready-to-publish gate → squash-clean finalize. Thin recipe over six overridable primitives; only hard dependency is dossier-mcp.
/dossier [task] Thin auxiliary command that forces vault profile loading before any other action. Solves the failure mode where multi-part prompts cause Claude to skip profile-load.

Each command's full behavior is documented in the corresponding file under commands/.

The phase recipes (/design, /scope, /decompose, /implement) share a cross-recipe kickback convention: downstream work that surfaces an upstream concern (or an information gap) prompts the agent to ask whether to context-switch back. Phases aren't strictly one-way. /decompose and /implement further refine this — research is handled inline rather than as a kickback, since research produces information rather than owned decisions. /implement is terminal: it kicks back to /scope//design but its forward handoff is the PR, for a human.

Roadmap

Planned but not shipped — see the Issues tab for state and discussion:

  • Plugin packaging — repackage as a proper Claude Code plugin once the workflows have weeks of real use.

License

MIT.