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Subtext skills are slash commands you type in your agent’s chat. Each skill injects a structured prompt that teaches your agent what tools exist, in what order to call them, and what constitutes a complete result. Instead of writing out a multi-step investigation request from scratch every time, you invoke a skill and your agent knows exactly what to do. There are two kinds of skills: workflow skills and atomic skills. Workflow skills like /subtext:review describe an end-to-end task — open a session, zoom to the moments that matter, explain what happened. Atomic skills like /subtext:shared and /subtext:session are building blocks — they teach the agent a single layer of context (conventions, tool catalog, usage patterns) that workflow skills compose together.

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Workflow skills

Workflow skills are the ones you invoke directly to get something done.

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/subtext:review

The main session review workflow. When you invoke /subtext:review, your agent runs a complete investigation: it lists available sessions, opens the one you care about, reads the event map, zooms to the moments that matter, captures snapshots at key timestamps, and produces a plain-English explanation of what happened. How to invoke it: Type /subtext:review in your agent’s chat, followed by enough context to identify the session or the problem. For example:
The agent will:
  1. Call review-list-sessions to find recent sessions and match against your description.
  2. Call review-open on the best match, read the event map, and orient itself.
  3. Call review-summary for a quick first pass.
  4. Call review-zoom one or more times, narrowing in on the intervals the event map flagged as significant.
  5. Call review-snapshot at key timestamps to capture visual evidence.
  6. Produce an explanation — what the user did, what the application did in response, where it diverged from expected behavior, and a root-cause hypothesis.
  7. Call review-close and record its conclusion.
Sample agent conversation:
You don’t need to specify a session ID. Describe the problem in natural language — “the error users hit on the pricing page yesterday afternoon” — and the agent will match it against the available sessions.

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Atomic skills

Atomic skills are the foundation that workflow skills are built on. You rarely invoke them directly, but understanding what they contain helps when you want to extend a workflow or debug why an agent isn’t using tools correctly.

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/subtext:shared

The foundation skill. Every other skill depends on it. /subtext:shared teaches your agent the MCP conventions Subtext uses: how handles work, how to interpret return values, what error shapes to expect, and the security rules that govern what the agent is and isn’t allowed to do with session data. When to invoke it directly: If your agent seems confused about MCP conventions — ignoring return values, passing wrong argument types, or not respecting privacy rules — invoke /subtext:shared to re-establish the baseline.
  • MCP handle lifecycle: how session handles are acquired, used, and released
  • Argument conventions: types, required vs optional parameters, error handling
  • Security rules: what data may be passed to external tools, what must stay local
  • Privacy baseline: form inputs are masked by default; the agent must not attempt to recover masked values

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/subtext:session

The session replay atomic skill. /subtext:session teaches your agent the complete catalog of review-* tools — what each one does, when to reach for it, and usage patterns that keep investigations efficient. When to invoke it directly: If your agent knows MCP conventions but is unsure which review tool to use for a given step, invoke /subtext:session to give it the tool-level context it needs.
  • Full catalog of review-* tools with parameter descriptions and return shapes
  • Recommended call order for a full investigation
  • When to use review-summary vs review-zoom vs review-snapshot
  • Resolution and time-window guidance for review-zoom
  • How to interpret the event map returned by review-open
  • How sightmap enrichment changes snapshot output

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How workflow and atomic skills relate

The /subtext:review workflow skill composes /subtext:shared and /subtext:session. When you invoke /subtext:review, the agent effectively gets all three layers of context at once:
You can invoke the atomic skills independently to refresh a specific layer without running the full workflow. This is useful if you’re building a custom harness and want to give your agent tool knowledge without prescribing a specific investigation flow.
Skills are delivered as MCP prompts, not system prompt injections. They are scoped to the conversation turn in which you invoke them — they don’t persist across sessions automatically. If you start a new chat, invoke the skill again.