/startup — Session Startup Briefing
You just opened your terminal and can't remember where you left off yesterday.
Prerequisite: /startup reads summaries written by /dailysummary. If you haven't been writing daily summaries, /startup falls back to git log and open file context — useful, but not the full picture. Build the /dailysummary habit at the end of each session first.
When you need this
- Starting a work session after any gap — overnight, a weekend, or longer
- You're juggling multiple projects and need to know which one needs attention
- You want to know what's blocked and what the next concrete action is
What it does — and what it won't
/startup reads your recent daily summaries and produces a prioritized briefing: what each workstream is doing, where it left off, what the next step is, and whether anything is blocked. It also shows git status and any running processes.
Worked example
Dario opens his laptop Tuesday morning after a three-day weekend. He was working on two things — a wage regression and a lit review — and isn't sure which was blocked.
/startup/startup reads the last three daily summaries and returns: Wage Regression — left off after adding state fixed effects, next step is placebo tests. Lit review — blocked, waiting on Autor (2014) to be extracted. Run /readable papers/autor2014.pdf to unblock. It also surfaces 3 uncommitted files from Thursday's session.
Try it
/startupPlan to run /dailysummary at the end of this session — that's what makes the next /startup useful.