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ponder

Convergent deliberation loop - repeated grading passes over one subject until the answer stops changing, with coverage enforced so no unit is silently skipped. Use when the user says "ponder <anything>" ("ponder the UI", "ponder our error handling"), "think this over properly", "keep thinking until it converges", "keep looping until it converges", "loop on this until it stops changing", "go through all the screens and grade them", "audit/rate/grade every X", or asks for any broad sweep-and-grade across many units where a single pass would miss things. Also use to resume or recover a ponder already in flight - "where were we", "carry on pondering", a lost thread mid-loop, or a .ponder/ directory in the project - where the move is to run ponder status rather than start over.

skills/ponder/SKILL.md

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# Ponder

Ponder runs repeated passes over one subject until the answer stops changing: each pass revises the previous pass's findings - adding what was missed (`Dreamer` → `add`), sharpening what was vague (`Builder` → `edit`), re-grading what was mis-scored from the human user's lived and emotional perspective (`Empath` → `change`), and retracting what was unsupported or dead-code noise (`Skeptic` → `delete`). You decide how many passes to run; the engine measures whether stopping is honest and refuses to let you stop while a single enumerated unit is ungraded.

Unlike standard multi-pass prompts that force an LLM to manufacture nitpicks or hallucinate when asked to review again, Ponder treats **epistemic silence** as the goal of late passes: all four voices must verify the evidence and speak in `deliberation.json` (`voices = 4`), but a voice whose findings already hold emits **zero deltas**. Two consecutive fully reviewed, confident quiet passes earn `stop (converged)`.

> **Lost the thread mid-ponder? Run `ponder status`.** It names the pass you are in, the phase you owe, and the literal next command. If you do not know the slug - or do not know whether a session exists at all - run `ponder list` first; a `.ponder/` directory in the project means one probably does. Do not start over: a second session throws away the first one's ledger, which is the whole value. See [Resumption](#resumption) before you conclude anything is missing.

The binary is `ponder` on `PATH` (`~/.local/bin/ponder`), `${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/bin/ponder` (when installed as a plugin), or `~/code/ponder/bin/ponder`. If `command -v ponder` fails and neither path exists, clone [`https://github.com/Quinnod345/ponder`](https://github.com/Quinnod345/ponder) to `~/code/ponder` and run `~/code/ponder/install.sh` from that reviewed checkout. **Every command ends with a `NEXT:` line naming the phase you now owe.** That line is the engine driving you, and it is the thing that survives a compaction.

Every `--file` in this document is a path you write first. Make the scratch directories once, before the first command: `mkdir -p .ponder/tmp/batch`. The engine ignores directories under `.ponder/` that hold no `session.json`, so `.ponder/tmp/` is a safe place to stage input - `tmp/` for what you hand the engine, `tmp/batch/` for what fan-out agents write.

The terminal transcripts below are abbreviated and are there to show you the *shape* of a pass. Where a transcript and the engine disagree, the engine is right - read its actual output.