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Guide

Guides

Each guide shows what to ask your agent, what it does, and how you'll know it worked or why it stopped. You ask in your own words, without learning discerndiscernA tool that lets you hand real work to coding agents and still decide what joins your project.'s commands.

New to discern? Start with Install and set up discern.

When a result doesn't match the guide

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A guide describes the usual path, and each result names the next step for your project now. When they differ, go by the result, and have your agent follow the recovery steps it names. Troubleshooting starts from the symptoms you can see.

In this section

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  1. Finish and land a changeReview a finished change, ask for fixes, and land it on your shared branch, even when other work has landed first.
  2. Land an urgent repairLand a fix before its tests and other checks finish, see exactly what you're skipping, and settle those checks afterwards.
  3. Fix a red gateHand a failing test or linter to your agent, know which decisions are yours, and recognize when the change is ready again.
  4. Recover an interrupted taskPick up an unfinished task in a new session, read back a run you lost track of, finish a landing that stopped partway, or restore work from a dropped branch.
  5. Delegate substantial workTurn a big idea into tasks that fresh agents can carry on their own, then review what comes back.
  6. Coordinate parallel tasksKeep several agents working at once, see which tasks need your decision, and land their results in the order you choose.
  7. Wait for another taskLet an agent carry on as soon as the work it needs from another task is ready, without you passing messages between them.
  8. Write project instructionsTell your agent a rule once, and every later session starts with it, in every coding tool your project uses.
  9. Maintain the project mapKeep a current, readable account of how your project works, so each new agent starts from it and you can correct a wrong assumption early.
  10. Create and manage skillsUse discern's ready-made skills, and give your agent your own tested methods that every later session and coding tool can reuse.
  11. Set and raise standardsLock in a measured gain so later changes can't give it back, and decide for yourself when a feature is worth a looser limit.
  12. Place and answer checkpointsName a review question once, and your agent answers it on every change it applies to, before you review.
  13. Improve how your agents workFind the change that would help your agents most, based on what happened in past tasks, then try it and see whether it helped.
  14. Connect a coding agentAdd a coding tool to your project, and it starts with the same instructions and skills as your other tools, and its changes face the same tests and linters.
  15. Use discern alongside other agent toolsKeep another tool's agent rules, skills, and settings working beside discern's, so neither tool undoes the other's files.
  16. Run the gate in CIRun your project's own checks on your code-hosting service, so a change that only breaks on another system is caught before it merges.
  17. Maintain or remove discernDiagnose, tidy, and upgrade discern in your project, or remove it and keep everything you wrote.
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