orient

Vault Orientation

Orient to the vault before doing any work. This skill assembles the full context payload: identity, polaris priorities, and topic-relevant content.

Workflow

1. Read ztlctl://self/identity — understand vault personality, owner, and structure. This establishes who owns the vault and what its core purpose is.

2. Read ztlctl://polaris — load strategic priorities (mission, active priorities, and decision principles). Polaris is Layer 1 of every context payload — always load it.

3. Call session_status() — check if a session is currently open. Surface the active session ID, topic, and duration if one exists.

4. Call work_queue() — get a summary count of actionable items (tasks, stale seeds, orphans). Report the total count and top 3 highest-scored items.

5. Call agent_context(topic="<user-topic>", budget=8000) — assemble the 5-layer context payload (polaris, related notes, graph neighbors, session history, methodology). If no specific topic was requested, omit the topic parameter for general vault orientation.

6. Report structured summary to the user before proceeding with any work.

What to report

After completing the workflow, surface:

• Vault identity — name, owner (if present in identity), and stated purpose
• Top 3 polaris priorities — the strategic priorities most relevant to the current topic
• Related content count — number of related notes found for the topic
• Session status — whether a session is currently open (ID, topic, duration)
• Work queue summary — total actionable items count and top 3 by score
• Methodology summary — one-liner from the vault identity describing the owner's working style

When NOT to use

• If already oriented in this conversation — skip re-reading identity and polaris (the context is still in your window). Call agent_context again only if the topic changes significantly.
• If the user issued a specific tool call — do not pre-orient before every single action. Orient once per conversation entry point, not before each operation.
• If orientation data is already present — check whether you have already read ztlctl://self/identity and ztlctl://polaris before re-reading them.

See references/context-assembly.md for details on the 5-layer context payload and budget tuning.