catchup

Purpose

Product people working on top of a codebase need to stay current with what engineers shipped — without risking the product context they've built up. This skill pulls the latest code and translates recent changes into product language.

Step 1: Protect product context

Before touching anything, confirm that product context files are safe:

1. Check that .acumen.md, .acumen/, and any other product context files exist and are gitignored
2. If any product context files are tracked by git (not gitignored), stop and warn the user — those files could be overwritten by a pull

List the protected files found and confirm they're safe.

Step 2: Pull latest code

1. Check for uncommitted changes with git status. If there are local changes to tracked files:
   • Run git stash to save them
   • Note that changes were stashed so you can report this later
2. Pull from main:

   git pull origin main
   

3. If there were stashed changes, run git stash pop and report any conflicts.

Step 3: Summarize what changed

Determine the time range:

• If the user provided a [since] argument (e.g., "last week", "since Monday", "3 days"), use it
• Otherwise, use the last time the user could have synced — check git reflog show --date=relative for the previous pull, or default to last 7 days

Gather changes

git log --since="<date>" --merges --oneline
git log --since="<date>" --no-merges --oneline

Also check for recently merged PRs if gh is available:

gh pr list --state merged --limit 20 --json number,title,body,mergedAt,author

Write the summary

Organize changes into a product-friendly summary. Do NOT just list commits — translate them:

• What shipped — new capabilities, visible changes, things users/stakeholders would notice
• What improved — performance, reliability, UX refinements
• What was fixed — bugs that were resolved
• Under the hood — refactors, infra, CI changes (keep brief, 1-2 lines max)

Rules:

• Lead with what matters to product people, not engineers
• Skip commit-level detail — group by theme
• Name the PRs/authors where relevant so the PM knows who to talk to
• If .acumen/features.md exists, reference which feature areas were touched
• Flag anything that might affect product context files (new features that need /features update, changes that affect personas, etc.)

Step 4: Suggest next actions

Based on what changed, suggest relevant Acumen commands:

• New feature shipped? → "Consider running /features to update the inventory"
• Metrics-related changes? → "Consider running /measure to check KPI health"
• Major release? → "Consider running /changelog to write release notes"
• Competitive-relevant change? → "Consider running /scout to update positioning"

Output format

## Sync complete

**Branch:** main
**Updated:** <previous HEAD>..<new HEAD> (<N> commits)
**Product context:** All .acumen/ files preserved

## What changed <since>

### Shipped
- ...

### Improved
- ...

### Fixed
- ...

### Under the hood
- ...

## Suggested next steps
- ...

Keep the whole summary concise — aim for something a PM can scan in 30 seconds.