/mold

Two modes, by analogy to /culture:

1. User-invoked full ceremony (default). The user typed /mold (or /cheese routed an explicit fuzzy-design ask straight here). Runs the full Explore/Ground/Shape/Sketch/Grill/Diagnose dialogue and the two-key handshake before any spec is written. The flow below describes this mode.
2. Agent-invoked mini-spec mode. /cheese calls into /mold at tier 1 of its escalation (see skills/cheese/SKILL.md § Escalation) when the cook fast-path checks all pass and a spec needs to materialise before /cook --auto runs. No dialogue, no handshake — the agent writes a mini-spec directly from the user's input (plus any tier-2 /culture / /briesearch synthesis) and returns the spec path. See ## Agent-invoked mini-spec mode below.

Do not use the user-invoked ceremony for free-form discussion with no artifact intent (/culture), direct implementation (/cook), or research-only questions (/briesearch).

Flow

1. Route — pick a starting mode from the input shape (see references/modes.md) and announce it in one line. If the user's framing rests on a false premise or a loaded assumption, name it before routing.
2. Dialogue — build shared understanding through the smallest useful question to the user, but contribute at maximum useful depth between questions (full options, named edge cases, concrete evidence — not gestural sketches). Ground every critical claim with cheez-search, cheez-read, or a Validate Cycle (references/validate-cycle.md). Track contradictions across turns; if turn N contradicts an earlier conclusion, flag and resolve it before continuing.
3. Sketch — for any feature touching >1 module or a new public interface, run the shape check (references/shape-check.md) on the touched symbols, then lock seams in pseudocode signatures before talking spec content. Default to full signatures, not hand-waving.
4. Two-key handshake — both the user (explicit verb) and the agent (coherence self-check) must agree before extraction. See references/handshake.md.
5. Curdle — resolve the durable spec path with SPEC=$(python3 ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/mold.pyz artifact-path specs <slug>), then write the approved spec to "$SPEC" (and optional issues alongside). The resolver anchors specs at the per-project durable corpus (see shared/formatting.md § Corpus location); never hardcode a .cheese/specs/ path. Format and slug rules in references/curdle.md.
6. Hand off — once the spec is on disk, run python3 ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/mold.pyz curd-count "$SPEC" --blast-radius <low|medium|high> to compute the recommended downstream skill (full procedure in references/curd-count.md). Omit --blast-radius when the shape-check verdict is [?] or shape-check was skipped — the script degrades to /cook for sub-threshold specs in that case. Then prompt the next step via the shared handoff gate in ../../shared/handoff-gate.md. Never dispatch before the user selects; after a non-stop selection, run the selected downstream skill immediately.

Modes