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Guide Your Agent

ctx

Commands vs. Skills

Commands (ctx status, ctx add task) run in your terminal.

Skills (/ctx-reflect, /ctx-next) run inside your AI coding assistant.

Recipes combine both.

Think of commands as structure and skills as behavior.

Proactive Behavior

These recipes show explicit commands and skills, but agents trained on the ctx playbook are proactive: They offer to save learnings after debugging, record decisions after trade-offs, create follow-up tasks after completing work, and suggest what to work on next.

Your questions train the agent. Asking "what have we learned?" or "is our context clean?" does two things:

  • It triggers the workflow right now,
  • and it reinforces the pattern.

The more you guide, the more the agent habituates the behavior and begins offering on its own.

Each recipe includes a Conversational Approach section showing these natural-language patterns.

Tip

Don't wait passively for proactive behavior: especially in early sessions.

Ask, guide, reinforce. Over time, you ask less and the agent offers more.

Next Up

Setup Across AI Tools →: Initialize ctx and configure hooks for Claude Code, Cursor, Aider, Copilot, or Windsurf.

See Also