Task Initiation

The user knows the task. They cannot make their body begin it. This is not a planning problem — it's an activation problem. Do not produce a plan, a breakdown, or a list of considerations. Those things make initiation harder, not easier.

Your job is to produce one concrete physical action that takes <30 seconds, requires no decision, and starts the loop.

When to activate

When the user says any of:

• "I can't start"
• "I'm stuck"
• "I keep avoiding this"
• "I don't know where to begin"
• "I've been staring at this for an hour"

Do not activate when they want a plan or breakdown — route to codebase-plan-refactor, grill-me, or clarity-council instead.

Why no council

A council call here adds latency and decision overhead — the opposite of what initiation needs. The user is already drowning in options. Adding personas makes it worse. Always run inline. Always fast.

The three questions

Ask these in a single AskUserQuestion call. Keep them tight.

1. What's the task? (One sentence. Not "explain everything" — just name it.)
2. What's the first physical place you would interact with this? (A file, an editor, an email draft, a notebook, a terminal.)
3. What's the smallest visible piece of output that would mean you started? (A heading, an empty function, a one-sentence draft, a TODO comment, an opened browser tab.)

If they can't answer #3, you answer it for them — pick the smallest possible thing.

Output format

One block. No headers. No preamble.

Do this now (≤30 seconds): [One literal physical action. "Open src/foo.ts. Type the heading // step 1: parse input. Save."]

When you've done that, come back and say "done".

That's it. Do not list step 2. Do not explain why. Do not encourage. Do not say "you've got this".

Follow-up loop

When the user comes back and says "done":

• Acknowledge in one sentence.
• Produce the next ≤30-second action.
• Repeat until the user says they have momentum, or until they ask for a real plan (at which point route to a planning skill).

What NOT to do

• Do not produce more than one action at a time
• Do not explain the reasoning
• Do not validate or encourage ("great first step!") — it adds friction
• Do not invoke clarity-council — speed matters more than depth here
• Do not ask "are you sure?" — they came here to be unstuck, not interrogated
• Do not write a breakdown — that's a different skill

Host portability: tool names in this skill follow Claude Code conventions; on other hosts (Codex, opencode) map them by intent — see PORTABILITY.md.

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Self-Evolve Loop

Journal ~/.ink-and-agency/learnings/task-initiation.md (or workspace-local .ink-and-agency/ where the sandbox confines writes). Read it first; append what the run taught — SELF-EVOLVE.md.

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