Office Hours — Workflow

Overview

How the office-hours skill works, step by step.

Source Workflow

Claude skill workflow.

Step-by-step Workflow

office-hours — Workflow

Auto-generated from SKILL.md. The skill itself is the source of truth; this is a human-readable map of what it does and how it runs.

What it does & when to use

YC Office Hours — two modes. Startup mode: six forcing questions that expose demand reality, status quo, desperate specificity, narrowest wedge, observation, and future-fit. Builder mode: design thinking brainstorming for side projects, hackathons, learning, and open source. Saves a design doc. Use when asked to "brainstorm this", "I have an idea", "help me think through this", "office hours", or "is this worth building". Proactively invoke this skill (do NOT answer directly) when the user describes a new product idea, asks whether something is worth building, wants to think through design decisions for something that doesn't exist yet, or is exploring a concept before any code is written. Use before /plan-ceo-review or /plan-eng-review. (gstack)

Triggers

  • brainstorm this
  • I have an idea
  • help me think through this
  • office hours
  • is this worth building

How it works

Workflow outline (sections of SKILL.md):

  1. Preamble (run first)
  2. Plan Mode Safe Operations
  3. Skill Invocation During Plan Mode
  4. Skill routing
  5. AskUserQuestion Format
  6. Artifacts Sync (skill start)
  7. Model-Specific Behavioral Patch (claude)
  8. Voice
  9. Context Recovery
  10. Writing Style (skip entirely if EXPLAIN_LEVEL: terse appears in the preamble echo OR the user's current message explicitly requests terse / no-explanations output)
  11. Completeness Principle — Boil the Lake
  12. Confusion Protocol
  13. Continuous Checkpoint Mode
  14. Context Health (soft directive)
  15. Question Tuning (skip entirely if QUESTION_TUNING: false)
  16. Repo Ownership — See Something, Say Something
  17. Search Before Building
  18. Completion Status Protocol
  19. Operational Self-Improvement
  20. Telemetry (run last)
  21. Plan Status Footer
  22. SETUP (run this check BEFORE any browse command)
  23. Phase 1: Context Gathering
  24. Prior Learnings
  25. Phase 2A: Startup Mode — YC Product Diagnostic
  26. Phase 2B: Builder Mode — Design Partner
  27. Phase 2.5: Related Design Discovery
  28. Phase 2.75: Landscape Awareness
  29. Phase 3: Premise Challenge
  30. Phase 3.5: Cross-Model Second Opinion (optional)
  31. Phase 4: Alternatives Generation (MANDATORY)
  32. Visual Design Exploration
  33. Visual Sketch (UI ideas only)
  34. Phase 4.5: Founder Signal Synthesis
  35. Phase 5: Design Doc
  36. Problem Statement
  37. Demand Evidence
  38. Status Quo
  39. Target User & Narrowest Wedge
  40. Constraints
  41. Premises
  42. Cross-Model Perspective
  43. Approaches Considered
  44. Recommended Approach
  45. Open Questions
  46. Success Criteria
  47. Distribution Plan
  48. Dependencies
  49. The Assignment
  50. What I noticed about how you think
  51. Problem Statement
  52. What Makes This Cool
  53. Constraints
  54. Premises
  55. Cross-Model Perspective
  56. Approaches Considered
  57. Recommended Approach
  58. Open Questions
  59. Success Criteria
  60. Distribution Plan
  61. Next Steps
  62. What I noticed about how you think
  63. Spec Review Loop
  64. Phase 6: Handoff — The Relationship Closing
  65. Capture Learnings
  66. Important Rules

Components

Single-file skill — all instructions live in SKILL.md.

Invoke

  • Slash: /office-hours
  • Or a natural-language request matching the triggers above.

Source: SKILL.md in this directory.

Execution Logic

The skill executes when its trigger fires (slash command, natural-language match, or direct invocation). It reads its references, applies its rules, and produces the documented outputs.

Edge Cases

See the source skill's references/ and scripts/ folders for edge-case handling.

Failure Handling

A skill failure surfaces as a tool error or a partial output; never a silent skip. Re-run with --verbose (where applicable) for diagnostics.

Integration Notes

  • Claude — invoked via the Skill tool with skill: "office-hours".
  • Codex — referenced from AGENTS.md if mirrored.
  • Antigravity — referenced from the workspace agent rules if mirrored.
  • HQ Project — listed on the landing page Skills section + post-login sidebar.
  • MD Project (md.sgnk.ai) — file rendered from Skills/Office Hours/workflow.md.
  • Obsidian — file rendered with frontmatter + tags.

Usage Examples

Invoke via slash command or natural language matching the skill description.

Source: ~/.claude/skills/office-hours/WORKFLOW.md