define

What it does

/cl-dev:define sharpens a single piece of your project's vocabulary and records it in your knowledge base glossary. You bring a term (a word your team uses that is vague, overloaded, or means something specific in your product), and the skill works with you to land on one clear definition, then writes it down where the whole workflow can see it.

The result is shared vocabulary. Once a term is defined, everyone picking up the work later (your teammates and the other cl-dev skills) reads from the same definition, so "sync," "run," or "account" means the same thing to all of them instead of quietly meaning three different things.

It works one term at a time, so each definition gets real attention rather than a rushed batch.

When to use it

Reach for /cl-dev:define whenever a word is doing too much work and it's causing confusion: a term that different people interpret differently, or a plain-English word that carries a special meaning in your domain. Capturing it once saves the same argument from happening again.

Good moments to define a term:

• A spec, design, or review keeps circling because a key word is ambiguous.
• You notice a new bit of domain jargon that a newcomer wouldn't understand.
• A term means one thing in your product and something else in everyday usage.

It pairs naturally with a couple of other skills. When /cl-dev:grill or a design review flags a fuzzy word, define is where you go to pin it down. And when /cl-dev:consolidate surfaces a term worth capturing after a feature ships, define is how you record it. If you're seeding a brand-new knowledge base, /cl-dev:extract gathers vocabulary in bulk through a broad interview; use define for the one-at-a-time additions and clean-ups that come afterward.

How to invoke it

Run the command inside your coding agent, in the target repository:

/cl-dev:define

Name the term you want to define when you start (for example, "define what we mean by account"), or run it bare and it will ask. It works best when the repository is already set up with CodeLantern (run /cl-dev:init first if it isn't), so there's a knowledge base for the definition to live in.