The /wait-what Skill

What it does

You type wait-what when you did not understand a message. The agent then re-pitches what it just said. It adds the context you were missing, writes in plain English, and uses the vocabulary from your project's GLOSSARY.md.

The skill is three lines long. That is the design, not an unfinished draft. Skills against verbosity usually fail because they grow too long. A four-hundred-line concision skill still leaves the model verbose, because the model copies the length of the skill, not its request. This one has a single precise leading word and nothing else.

When to reach for it

You invoke it by typing /wait-what. The agent will not reach for it on its own, and it shouldn't. Only you know when you stopped following.

Use it as soon as you notice you're skimming. For example, the agent has started to use jargon it invented, put five acronyms in one sentence, or explained a decision whose premise you never saw. It fixes the conversation you're already in. To stop the jargon arriving at all, use grill-with-docs, which builds the shared language upfront.

The name is the mechanism

The leading word is wait. "Be concise" is an instruction about the agent's output, and the model obeys it by clipping words and losing you further. Wait is about your state. It says you stopped understanding here. An agent that hears "be brief" writes clipped fragments. An agent that hears "wait, you lost me" backs up and explains.

That difference is the whole skill. Every popular fix for verbosity names the output: /tldr, /no-fluff, /talk-normal. The model over-corrects into clipped fragments that are shorter and no clearer. Naming the listener asks for both halves at once: fewer words and the context you were missing.

The skill says re-pitch that, not "that last message". What lost you is usually bigger than one paragraph, so the agent decides how far back to go.

It plugs into the language you already have

The body reuses the leading words already in your global CLAUDE.md and your project's GLOSSARY.md. ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English sets the register. The ubiquitous language supplies the nouns. The skill, CLAUDE.md and GLOSSARY.md use the same tokens, so invoking it is not a new instruction. It is a reminder of one the agent already agreed to.

If you have no GLOSSARY.md (and no GLOSSARY-MAP.md pointing to one for the context at hand), the skill still works. You lose only the domain-vocabulary half.

It's working if

• The re-pitch is shorter and clearer, not shorter and blunter.
• It adds the premise you were missing, instead of only deleting words.
• Project nouns replace invented ones. The terms in your GLOSSARY.md come back.
• You can use it twice in a row, and it does not degrade into terseness.

Where it fits

You can use wait-what at any point, in any conversation, inside any other skill. It repairs one message after the fact. The real fix is a shared language agreed upfront, and that is grill-with-docs: a grilling session that runs domain-modeling as it goes, so it records the words you both use in your GLOSSARY.md. If you're unsure which skill fits the moment, ask-matt routes you.