Recipes

Workflow recipes showing how ctx commands and skills work together.

Each recipe solves a specific problem by combining multiple tools into a step-by-step workflow.

Guide Your Agent¶

These recipes show explicit commands and skills, but agents trained on the ctx playbook are proactive: they offer to save learnings after debugging, record decisions after trade-offs, create follow-up tasks after completing work, and suggest what to work on next.

Your questions train the agent. Asking "what have we learned?" or "is our context clean?" does two things:

• It triggers the workflow right now,
• and it reinforces the pattern.

The more you guide, the more the agent habituates the behavior and begins offering on its own.

Each recipe includes a Conversational Approach section showing these natural-language patterns.

Getting Started¶

Setting Up ctx Across AI Tools¶

Initialize ctx and configure hooks for Claude Code, Cursor, Aider, Copilot, or Windsurf. Includes shell completion, watch mode for non-native tools, and verification.

Uses: ctx init, ctx hook, ctx agent, ctx completion, ctx watch

Keeping Context in a Separate Repo¶

Store context files outside the project tree: in a private repo, shared directory, or anywhere else. Useful for open source projects with private context or multi-repo setups.

Uses: ctx init, --context-dir, --allow-outside-cwd, .contextrc, /ctx-status

Daily Workflow¶

These recipes cover the workflows you will use every day when working with ctx.

The Complete Session¶

Walk through a full ctx session from start to finish: loading context, picking what to work on, committing with context capture, reflecting, and saving a snapshot.

Uses: ctx status, ctx agent, /ctx-remember, /ctx-next, /ctx-commit, /ctx-reflect

Tracking Work Across Sessions¶

Add, prioritize, complete, snapshot, and archive tasks. Keep TASKS.md focused as your project evolves across dozens of sessions.

Uses: ctx add task, ctx complete, ctx tasks archive, ctx tasks snapshot, /ctx-add-task, /ctx-archive, /ctx-next

Persisting Decisions, Learnings, and Conventions¶

Record architectural decisions with rationale, capture gotchas and lessons learned, and codify coding conventions so they survive across sessions and team members.

Uses: ctx add decision, ctx add learning, ctx add convention, ctx decisions reindex, ctx learnings reindex, /ctx-add-decision, /ctx-add-learning, /ctx-add-convention, /ctx-reflect

Syncing Scratchpad Notes Across Machines¶

Distribute your scratchpad encryption key, push and pull encrypted notes via git, and resolve merge conflicts when two machines edit simultaneously.

Uses: ctx init, ctx pad, ctx pad resolve, scp

Using the Scratchpad with Claude¶

Use the encrypted scratchpad for quick notes, working memory, and sensitive values during AI sessions. Natural language in, encrypted storage out.

Uses: ctx pad, /ctx-pad, ctx pad show, ctx pad edit

Maintenance¶

Hook Output Patterns¶

Choose the right output pattern for your Claude Code hooks: VERBATIM relay for user-facing reminders, hard gates for invariants, agent directives for nudges, and five more patterns across the spectrum.

Uses: ctx plugin hooks, settings.local.json

Claude Code Permission Hygiene¶

Keep .claude/settings.local.json clean: recommended safe defaults, what to never pre-approve, and a maintenance workflow for cleaning up session debris.

Uses: ctx init, /ctx-drift, /sanitize-permissions, ctx permissions snapshot, ctx permissions restore

Permission Snapshots¶

Capture a known-good permission baseline as a golden image, then restore at session start to automatically drop session-accumulated permissions.

Uses: ctx permissions snapshot, ctx permissions restore, /sanitize-permissions

Detecting and Fixing Drift¶

Keep context files accurate by detecting structural drift (stale paths, missing files, stale file ages) and task staleness. Includes alignment audits to verify documentation claims match agent instructions.

Uses: ctx drift, ctx sync, ctx compact, ctx status, /ctx-drift, /ctx-alignment-audit, /ctx-status, /ctx-prompt-audit

History and Discovery¶

Browsing and Enriching Past Sessions¶

Export your AI session history to a browsable journal site. Normalize rendering, enrich entries with metadata, and search across months of work.

Uses: ctx recall list/show/export, ctx journal site, ctx journal obsidian, ctx serve, /ctx-recall, /ctx-journal-normalize, /ctx-journal-enrich, /ctx-journal-enrich-all

Advanced¶

Running an Unattended AI Agent¶

Set up a loop where an AI agent works through tasks overnight without you at the keyboard, using ctx for persistent memory between iterations.

This recipe shows how ctx supports long-running agent loops without losing context or intent.

Uses: ctx init --ralph, ctx loop, ctx watch, ctx load, /ctx-loop, /ctx-implement, /ctx-context-monitor

When to Use a Team of Agents¶

Decision framework for choosing between a single agent, parallel worktrees, and a full agent team.

This recipe covers the file overlap test, when teams make things worse, and what ctx provides at each level.

Uses: /ctx-worktree, /ctx-next, ctx status

Parallel Agent Development with Git Worktrees¶

Split a large backlog across 3-4 agents using git worktrees, each on its own branch and working directory. Group tasks by file overlap, work in parallel, merge back.

Uses: /ctx-worktree, /ctx-next, git worktree, git merge

Turning Activity into Content¶

Generate blog posts from project activity, write changelog posts from commit ranges, and publish a browsable journal site from your session history.

The output is generic Markdown, but the skills are tuned for the ctx-style blog artifacts you see on this website.

Uses: ctx journal site, ctx journal obsidian, ctx serve, ctx recall export, /ctx-blog, /ctx-blog-changelog, /ctx-journal-enrich, /ctx-journal-normalize