Standardize Development with Context Artifacts

This skill establishes "Context-Driven Development": treating project context as a managed artifact alongside code rather than ad-hoc prompts or scattered docs. It defines five canonical documents under a conductor/ directory - product.md (what and why), product-guidelines.md (how to communicate), tech-stack.md (with what), workflow.md (how to work), and tracks.md (what's happening) - plus a Context -> Spec & Plan -> Implement workflow that runs Context, Specification, Planning, and Implementation phases in order. It also documents when to update each artifact, how greenfield projects bootstrap via /conductor:setup versus how brownfield projects extract implicit context from existing code, and a validation checklist to run before starting any track. It also defines a five-stage context lifecycle - creation, validation, evolution, synchronization, and archival - and names five recurring anti-patterns to guard against: stale context that goes outdated and misleading, context sprawl across scattered documents, implicit context that's never written down, one person hoarding context updates without team input, and over-specifying context until it becomes impossible to maintain.

Use it when setting up a new Conductor-based project, onboarding a team member to an existing one, deciding whether a context document needs updating, or reconciling greenfield versus brownfield context. Skip it for anything unrelated to context-driven development or that needs a different domain or tool outside this scope.

Input: project state (new or existing codebase) plus the conductor/ structure - index.md, product.md, product-guidelines.md, tech-stack.md, workflow.md, tracks.md, code_styleguides/, and per-track spec.md/plan.md/metadata.json. Output: a validated, synchronized set of context artifacts plus a completed pre-implementation checklist covering product, technical, workflow, and track context. It also prescribes session-continuity behavior: read index.md and tracks.md at the start of a session, and update plan.md and tracks.md with progress, blockers, and any uncommitted decisions at the end, so multi-session work doesn't lose state between sessions.

Built around the /conductor:setup command, which either interactively creates all artifacts for a new project or detects and pre-populates them from an existing codebase for a brownfield one, tracking progress in a resumable setup_state.json. Recommends wiring context validation into IDEs, pre-commit git hooks, and CI/CD pipelines.

Teams running multi-session, AI-assisted development who need consistent AI behavior and fast onboarding, and want context changes to move through the same review process as code changes - and who want the resulting team alignment, AI consistency, institutional memory, and quality assurance measured against concrete artifacts rather than tribal knowledge.