durable-context

Invocation-only skills and repository scaffolding for planning large initiatives, resuming them across sessions, and preserving architectural conclusions.

npx durable-context init --project-name "My App"

This adds context/, decisions/, and the recommended dc front-door skill. Invoke it with an explicit initiative name:

/dc customer-import

If no name is supplied, the skill lists candidates and asks. It never treats a branch name as the initiative identity. For small work it recommends ordinary agent planning and creates nothing unless the human opts in.

Cycles

Initiatives live under context/cycles/<cycle-id>/initiatives/. A cycle is a generic container: each project may map it to a sprint, release, milestone, quarter, or another meaningful cadence. Fresh installations provision and select default; an omitted cycle resolves to the current cycle recorded with project-owned policy in context/project-profile.md.

On update, pre-cycle context/initiatives/ folders move into default after a collision check. Their lifecycle metadata is not changed. The package does not create cycle plans, capacity, schedules, or project backlogs; those remain in Jira, GitHub, or the project's equivalent.

Lifecycle

New initiatives start with only README.md and plan.md and track:

Planning -> Plan Review -> Detailed Design -> Implementation
         -> Verification -> PR Preparation

Conditions are Active, Paused, Blocked, Complete, and Abandoned. Checkpoints preserve the next action and evidence across users, agents, and sessions. Challenge review is advisory; once a material challenge is recorded, only its dependent work is blocked until a human concludes Retain, Revise, Replace, or Accept Risk.

Detailed Design confirms each concern as Local, External, Hybrid, or Not applicable before creating documents. backlog.md is a bounded trace of work inside the initiative. follow-up.md records work handed elsewhere and is created only when needed. PR readiness requires each follow-up to be completed, transferred, or explicitly transfer-waived by a human; the destination system owns transferred work.

When repository evidence cannot settle human intent, the skills pause at the current boundary and ask focused, decision-bearing questions. They preserve the result, not the conversation: artifacts keep the minimum information needed to resume or understand the work—conclusions, rationale and constraints, evidence, material unknowns, and the next action—without transcripts or routine narration.

Advanced Entry Points

All skills are invocation-only:

• dc — recommended front door
• project-profile-baseline and project-profile-refresh
• plan-with-context
• challenge
• dive-into-plan
• backfill-with-context for work that grew beyond an ordinary plan
• checkpoint-context for deterministic lifecycle validation and state capture

Existing initiatives without lifecycle markers remain on the legacy workflow and never receive lifecycle metadata automatically. Accepted root decisions must remain understandable after disposable cycles are deleted.

Update

npx durable-context@latest update

Update refreshes package-managed skills and marked guidance, renames the package-managed front door from durable-context to dc, moves flat initiatives into the canonical default cycle, and preserves their contents and legacy status. It retires the former package-managed devils-advocate skill in favor of challenge.

Use npx durable-context cycle init <cycle-id> to create or select the sole current cycle.

Commands/options: init, update, status, cycle init, --target, --dry-run, and --force for init.

For release-anchored shipped-behavior documentation, see reference-docs.