reboot

The session is old or bloated and should be cleared. Your job: hand the user a clean, self-contained prompt they can paste into a fresh session and keep going — no thread lost.

You can’t run /clear yourself. You produce the reprompt; the user clears and pastes.

Sources

Primary: the current conversation you already hold. That’s the real source of the goal and state.
Cross-check / fill gaps: the freshest handoff in ~/.claude/handoffs/ — pick the one matching the current working directory, else the most recently modified — and its .compact.md sibling if present. These are the same sources sessionstart-handoff.sh re-injects into a new session.

Distill into the reprompt

Capture only what a fresh Claude needs:

Goal — what “done” looks like, in one or two lines.
State — what’s already done / decided.
Next step — the immediate thing to do.
Constraints — hard rules or decisions already locked in.
Key paths — files/dirs in play.

Drop dead-ends, resolved tangents, and tool noise.

Output

Two short lines first: why the session looks stale, and what to do — /clear (or open a new terminal), then paste the block below.

Then one fenced code block = the paste-ready reprompt. Write it as a direct instruction to a fresh Claude. It must be fully self-contained — assume the reader saw none of this session. No “as discussed”, no dangling pronouns.

Honesty

Don’t invent state. If branch, dirty files, or anything else is uncertain, write “verify before acting” instead of asserting it — same disclaimer the handoff itself uses. A wrong “current state” is worse than an admitted gap.