rouse

/rouse — wake up and pick up where you left off

The counterpart to /roost. Load the most recent handoff, check what (if anything) changed overnight, and tee up the next step — so the user starts the day already oriented instead of re-reading their own code.

Same bird, dawn instincts. Three traits, three steps.

Steps

Night vision — see from almost nothing

Tube-shaped eyes gather every scrap of light to make a picture in near-dark. Do the same: reconstruct a full session from one sparse handoff file.

Look in .nightowl/ in the current project for handoff-*.md and pick the newest by filename. Names are handoff-YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM.md (the -HHMM means a day can hold more than one), and both date and time sort lexically, so the last line is the newest:

ls -1 .nightowl/handoff-*.md 2>/dev/null | sort | tail -1

If none exists, say so plainly — "No handoff found in .nightowl/. Nothing to resume; run /roost tonight to leave yourself one." — and stop.

Read it. Pay attention to Where I left off, Cache, Pellet, Open / next steps, Gotchas, and Resume command. The Cache tells you what in-flight work to recover; the Pellet tells you which approaches are already dead — don't re-attempt them.

270° head swivel — scan back and forward

An owl pivots its head most of the way around without moving its body. Use both directions:

• Look back. The repo may have moved since the handoff was written. In a git repo, check:

  git status --short
  git log --oneline -5
  

  Compare against the handoff. Call out drift explicitly: commits that landed after the handoff, files now dirty/clean that weren't, a branch that changed. If something in the handoff is now stale (e.g. "next step: finish X" but X was already committed), say so — don't blindly trust the note.

• Look forward. Recover the Cache (is that stash / WIP edit still there?) and confirm the Pellet's dead ends are still walls before you point at the next step.

Asymmetric ears — pinpoint the next move

Offset ears triangulate prey to an exact spot in total dark. Land the brief on one exact next move, not a vague direction. Keep it short, skimmable:

• Last session: one line — what they were doing.
• Since then: what changed in the repo (or "nothing — picking up clean").
• Next up: the top open step, made concrete (file:line, the exact edit).

Then offer to fly — ask if they want you to begin on the top next step (or run the handoff's Resume command). Don't auto-run it — wait for go.

Notes

• Read-only orientation. Don't edit, commit, or run anything destructive — just read the handoff + git state and report.
• The counterpart skill is /roost — that's what writes the handoff this one reads.
• If multiple handoffs exist, mention you loaded the newest and how many older ones are sitting in .nightowl/.
• Keep the brief tight. The point is a fast start, not a wall of text.
• Called again in the same session? You've already loaded the handoff — don't re-brief from scratch as if just waking up. Re-ground against the current state and give a short delta instead: what's progressed since you resumed, what's still next (or "nothing's changed since"). Treat the repeat as a status check, not a fresh start.