/combo distils the work you just finished into a reusable SKILL.md draft.
/combo # preview the draft
/combo my-name --write # write it to .deepcode/skills/<name>/SKILL.md
DeepCode's skill system was already complete — the loader, the frontmatter
schema, three source layers, overrides. What was missing was the generating
end: every SKILL.md had to be written by hand, up front, before anyone knew
what the work would involve.
That's backwards. The moment you finish a task is the moment you understand it
best. /combo extracts the automation after the work rather than asking you to
configure it before.
The draft's allowed-tools lists exactly the tools the thread actually called.
This matters more than it looks. Hand-written skills are almost always broader
than they need to be, because guessing generously is easier than auditing — a
skill that only reads files ends up with Bash in its list "just in case".
Deriving the set from a real run gives you least privilege for free.
/combo alone prints the draft and writes nothing. A second invocation with
--write commits it. A skill assembled from a transcript is a shareable
artifact, so you read it before it exists on disk.
Writing one is recorded on the governance ledger — creating a skill changes what future runs may do, which is not an ordinary file edit.
--write refuses to overwrite an existing skill. Pick another name.
Credential-shaped values are replaced with [REDACTED]: API keys, GitHub
tokens, AWS key ids, JWTs, PEM private keys, and password:/token:-style
assignments.
Paths your file contract denies reading are dropped entirely. A rule that stops at the tool call but not at the export isn't much of a rule — the filename alone leaks.
Either way the draft tells you what was withheld, so you're not guessing:
withheld: redacted API key
withheld: path excluded by file contract: .env
It carries a # TODO: review before use marker and is not auto-enabled. It was
generated from a transcript; read it before you rely on it.
Floatboat's Combo sits on a "Tacit Engine" that passively observes activity
across files, browser tabs, and system apps to build a habit model. DeepCode
does not do that. /combo reads the current thread, only when you type it,
and never aggregates across threads or runs in the background.
The useful part of the idea — extract the automation after the work — needs no passive collection at all.