If you spend any meaningful amount of time working with Claude Code, you’ll eventually hit a familiar wall: you open a conversation, ask it to do something, and it starts poking around your project like it’s never been there before.

Because it hasn’t. Every conversation starts fresh.

That’s fine for small projects. But when you’re working across a monorepo with a dozen cloud functions, shared utilities, and deployment scripts, watching Claude re-explore the same directory tree for the fifth time in yet-another-worktree in a single day, it gets old (and expensive, as far as tokens are concerned).

So I built /onboard. It’s a Claude Code skill that scans the current working directory, builds a structured summary of the codebase, and caches it so future conversations can skip the discovery phase entirely.

It started life as a slash command called /ingest, but I’ve since ported it to a proper skill with smarter defaults and a key-files-first approach that keeps token costs down.

Granted, it’s very much experimental right now (so much so I’m documenting the process of evaluating it).


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