Step Back to 20K Feet
Force Claude to zoom out mid-thread and reassess whether the work is aligned to the original goal.
Productivityp4
by AgentVoltv1.0.0Published 1y ago1 install
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Before & after
Same prompt, same agent — the only difference is the skill.
Prompt“We have been at this for two hours. Step back — are we on track?”
Beforegeneric AI agent
Sure! Let me summarize where we've gotten to. We started by looking at your authentication issue, then explored a few different approaches. We tried adjusting the session middleware, then moved on to debugging the token refresh logic, and most recently we've been working on the Redis connection pooling. We've made good progress on several fronts. The session handling is cleaner now, and we've identified some improvements to the caching layer. Shall we keep going with the connection pooling, or would you like to focus on something else?
Afterwith Step Back to 20K Feet
20K FEET WHAT YOU ASKED FOR (message 1) "Users get logged out randomly after about 15 minutes." WHAT WE ACTUALLY DID 0:00 Reproduced it. Confirmed 15-min logout. ✓ on track 0:20 Found session middleware refreshing on every request 0:35 Refactored the middleware ← first drift 1:10 Refactor surfaced a token-refresh race, fixed that 1:40 Fixing the race led to Redis connection pooling 2:00 Currently tuning pool size WHERE THEY DIVERGED At 0:35. You had the diagnosis — the middleware was refreshing every request instead of on expiry. That was a one-line fix. The refactor was optional work that generated its own follow-on work, and each step after it was a legitimate response to a problem the previous step created. IS THE ORIGINAL BUG FIXED? Unverified. We have not re-tested the 15-minute logout since 0:35. CORRECTED PLAN 1. Stash the pooling work. It's real, it's just not this. 2. Re-test the original repro. It may already be fixed. 3. If fixed: ship the one-line change alone, file the rest as follow-ups. 4. If not: resume from the 0:20 diagnosis, not from here. Worth naming: I'd have happily kept tuning the pool. Each step looked reasonable from the step before it. That's the failure mode this exists to catch.
About this skill
name: conversation-step-back-reset description: Force Claude to zoom out mid-thread and reassess whether the work is aligned to the original goal. Use when working on step back to 20k feet.
Step Back to 20K Feet
Invoked when a chat has drifted into a rabbit hole. Summarizes what was intended, what actually happened, and where the two diverged, then proposes a corrected plan. Counters the LLM tendency to reward you for continuing wherever you have already gone. Use anytime you feel a session has gone sideways and you want a sanity check.
What you get
- Original-intent restatement
- Drift diagnosis
- Recommended reset action
- Kill list of tangents
- Corrected next steps
- Session-cost recap
Customize your output
- Scope: current thread, project-wide
- Tone: blunt, gentle
- Reset type: soft (suggest), hard (start-over recipe)
- Preserve context: full, decisions only
- Notify on drift threshold: 5, 10, 20 percent divergence
- Log to memory: yes, no
Example output
'You set out to add a title normalizer. You ended up scaffolding a new pipeline. Recommend reverting and doing the smaller change.'
Best for
Anyone who does long-form work with Claude.
Note: A must for founders who use Claude as a thinking partner. High confidence.
SKILL.md preview
SKILL.md
---
name: conversation-step-back-reset
description: Use when a chat session has drifted into a rabbit hole and needs a zoomed-out reassessment against the original goal.
version: 1.0.0
category: Productivity
author: AgentVolt
license: proprietary
tags:
- productivity
- p4
---
# Step Back to 20K Feet
Forces a mid-thread zoom-out: summarizes what was intended, what happened, where the two diverged, and proposes a corrected plan.
## When to use
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