consigliere-bootstrap

consigliere-bootstrap stands up the foundation of the consigliere — a manager’s private chief-of-staff workspace. Where the tech-lead bundle multiplies the team, the consigliere multiplies the manager themselves: it digests the diverse inputs a manager lives in — meeting transcripts, Slack, Jira, Confluence — into living, grounded memory that tracks status, blockers, decisions, the map of systems, and the political risk that never makes it into Jira.

This skill does one thing: it creates the workspace. No digesting, no querying, no heuristics — those land in later skills. It is the scaffold the rest of the kit is built on.

The model — contexts and projects

• Context — a perennial node in a tree of arbitrary depth (product → domain → sub-domain). Each node holds its own materialized state. Example: commerce → catalog.
• Project — a temporal effort (start / middle / end), and cross-cutting: a single project can span several contexts and even several workspaces. Example: checkout-revamp crosses both payments and fulfillment. Projects live under projects/ and link the contexts they touch through meta.yml.

The workspace contract

<manager-workspace>/                       # a PRIVATE repo
├── README.md
├── .gitignore
├── sources/YYYY/MM/<date>-<slug>.<ext>    # raw inputs, IMMUTABLE — the grounding base
├── contexts/<ctx>/[<subctx>/...]          # perennial tree
│   ├── state.md                           # materialized current state (6 fixed sections)
│   ├── journal.md                         # append-only, dated
│   └── playbook.md                        # heuristics (optional)
├── projects/<proj>/                       # temporal, cross-cutting
│   ├── meta.yml                           # contexts: [...], status, dates
│   ├── state.md
│   ├── journal.md
│   └── playbook.md
└── people/<person>.md

Every node — context or project — carries the same trio: state.md (materialized current state) + journal.md (append-only, dated) + playbook.md (heuristics, optional). That uniformity is a contract the later skills depend on.

The six fixed sections in every state.md — Status by workstream, Blockers, Decisions, System & area map, Actions, Political risk — are the digest contract. Every claim traces back to a line under sources/ via a (src: …) anchor: if it is not in a source, it is not asserted.

The write-guard — your private data stays private

Two rules make privacy structural, not a matter of discipline:

• The absolute path of your workspace is stored in the consigliere.workspace config key.
• Every consigliere skill may write only inside that path. Before any write, it asserts the target is inside the configured workspace and aborts otherwise. The consigliere never writes outside the configured workspace — meeting transcripts and political-risk notes cannot leak into a team repo.

When you point the bootstrap at a directory that looks like a code repo (a package.json, a .csproj, a src/), it warns and asks for explicit confirmation before scaffolding there.

Using it

/octopus:consigliere-bootstrap

It asks for your private workspace path, warns if it looks like a code repo, materializes the directory contract (with a sample context and project as living documentation), records consigliere.workspace, and points you at /octopus:digest-source as the next step.

Where it sits

consigliere-bootstrap is the first member of the consigliere bundle, kept separate from tech-lead by design (different audience, different data, different activation context). It is the foundation for digest-source (capture), context-status (consult), playbook-review (the learning loop), and the consigliere role.