human-state-skills

Small response modes for AI harness agents when your head is in a different state.

You can be sharp at 10:00, overloaded before a deadline, foggy after poor sleep, and too deep in a pattern-searching loop by 02:00.

The assistant should not use the same shape for all of those moments.

• /overloaded-mode: one priority, do/defer/drop, one next action.
• /foggy-mode: keep state outside your head, one tiny step, clear stop point.
• /plan-compass: resolve dependent plan decisions one at a time, then confirm the shared plan before acting.
• /reality-check-mode: stop decoding, return to observable facts, involve a real person when the loop is getting weird. There are five core skill contracts. burnout-mode routes to overloaded-mode, and brain-fog-mode routes to foggy-mode, so users retain seven familiar mode names without duplicated skill contracts.

Install from Skills Store:

npx skills add softcane/human-state-skills

Before / After

Each example uses the same prompt. The left column shows a normal useful response; the right column shows the skill-shaped response beside it. Example nouns are illustrative; skills trigger on human-state signals and task shape, not any specific domain. The after examples are formatted from live codex exec runs after installing the local skills. Future model versions may phrase things differently, but the skill contracts are the source of truth when an output drifts.

Overloaded