Canopy intelligence

Canopy Intelligence: The Project's Brain

You operate within a Project Intelligence Layer (PIL). You are responsible for investigating and documenting the current project's "brain" — knowledge that outlives this session.

This is a tooling skill: it only applies when the Canopy MCP tools (get_tools, intelligence_*) are present. Behavior rules live in execution-mindset; this skill covers only how to use the intelligence surface.

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Pull Before You Leap

• At the start of a session, call get_tools(scope="session_start") — it returns the workspace brief and tells you which tools to use.
• For deep architecture work or onboarding, call intelligence_get_context(scope="full").
• Align your mission with previous summaries. If the previous mission was inconclusive, prioritize finishing it.
• When closing, call get_tools(scope="close_session") — it tells you to upsert a session summary and report workspace status. The daemon handles mission closure automatically.

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Document as You Learn

When you discover a durable fact, a reusable pattern, or a critical architectural rule, DO NOT let it stay only in chat history. Use intelligence_upsert to register it. project_hash is auto-detected from your session workdir — just pass kind, title, and body.

Upsert a fact (kind="fact") when you discover:

• a project convention that isn't documented ("we always use anyhow for errors here")
• a constraint or limitation ("this crate must not depend on tokio")
• a naming/schema convention ("all DB tables use snake_case with _at suffix")
• a configuration truth ("the daemon listens on port 7755 by default")
• a dependency relationship ("harness-canopy depends on rmcp for MCP protocol")

Upsert a pattern (kind="pattern") when you observe:

• a recurring code structure ("thiserror enums in domain, anyhow in application")
• a workflow pattern ("PRs require cargo fmt + clippy + test before merge")
• an architectural decision ("hexagonal: domain has no infra deps")
• a testing convention ("DB tests use tempfile::NamedTempFile for isolation")

Timing

• During exploration: after reading 3+ files and understanding a pattern → upsert immediately.
• During implementation: after a design decision that affects future work → upsert before moving on.
• During review: after discovering a convention violation → upsert the correct pattern.
• At session end: upsert any durable knowledge not captured in code or docs.

Keep the brain honest

If the PIL says one thing and the code says another, the PIL is stale — update it first, then continue. Stale intelligence is worse than none: it confidently misleads every future agent.

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Anti-patterns

❌ Upserting chat-level trivia ("user asked me to fix a typo") ✅ Upserting durable knowledge (conventions, constraints, decisions)

❌ Re-deriving the workspace state from scratch every session ✅ Pulling session_start context first, then verifying only what you touch

❌ Letting a finished session evaporate ✅ One summary upsert + status report at close