/cf-help

Answer questions about Coding Friend — skills, agents, workflows, setup. Also auto-invoked.

Context footprint: (high) — what does this mean?

CLI Requirement: NONE

Works without coding-friend-cli. See CLI requirements for the full matrix.

The /cf-help skill answers questions about the Coding Friend toolkit. It provides a brief overview when asked generally, and reads specific skill files on-demand when you ask about a particular skill, agent, or workflow.

This skill is also auto-invoked — you don't need to type /cf-help manually. Just ask naturally about Coding Friend and it will activate automatically:

"What skills are available?"
"How does cf-plan work?"
"What agents exist?"
"How do I configure Coding Friend?"
"Which skill should I use for X?"

Usage

/cf-help
/cf-help how does cf-tdd work?
/cf-help what agents are available?

# Or just ask naturally — cf-help auto-invokes:
"what skills does coding friend have?"
"how do I get started?"

What It Does

General questions — Provides an overview of Coding Friend: core philosophy, available skills, agents, and conventions
Specific skill questions — Reads the relevant SKILL.md file and explains how the skill works
Agent questions — Reads the agent definition and explains its capabilities
Setup/config questions — Explains configuration options, custom guides, and ignore patterns

How It Works

Unlike other skills that follow a fixed workflow, /cf-help is adaptive:

For general "what is Coding Friend?" questions, it provides a built-in overview
For specific questions like "how does /cf-commit work?", it reads plugin/skills/cf-commit/SKILL.md and summarizes
For agent questions, it reads plugin/agents/<name>.md

This keeps the skill lightweight — it doesn't duplicate content from every skill, but reads on-demand.

`/cf-help` vs `cf help`

These are two different things:

	`/cf-help`	`cf help`
What	A Coding Friend plugin skill	A CLI command
Where	Inside Claude Code	In your terminal
Purpose	Answers questions about Coding Friend skills, agents, and workflows	Shows available CLI commands and usage
Powered by	The plugin skill system (`plugin/skills/cf-help/SKILL.md`)	Built-in commander.js help

In short: /cf-help is an AI-powered assistant that explains how Coding Friend works, while cf help is standard CLI usage output from the coding-friend-cli tool.

Common Workflows

If you ask how skills work together, /cf-help presents these common workflows:

Build a feature: /cf-plan → implement → /cf-review → /cf-commit → /cf-ship
Fix a bug: /cf-fix → (auto: review) → /cf-commit
Quick question: /cf-ask → answer saved to docs/memory/
Deep research: /cf-research → /cf-plan → implement
End of session: /cf-remember (project context for AI) + /cf-learn (educational notes for human)
Optimize: /cf-optimize → baseline → fix → measure → compare

Troubleshooting

/cf-help can also answer troubleshooting questions:

Skill not triggering? Check description in SKILL.md — use /cf-<skill-name> to trigger manually.
Custom guide not loading? Verify the path: .coding-friend/skills/<skill-name>-custom/SKILL.md.
Config not applied? Local .coding-friend/config.json overrides global ~/.coding-friend/config.json. Check both.
After editing plugin files? Run cf dev sync to copy changes to the cached version.

For a full list of common issues (installation, hooks, memory daemon, MCP, CLI), see the Troubleshooting reference.

Tips

Type /cf-help with no arguments for a full overview of available commands
Ask about a specific skill to get detailed workflow steps
Ask about configuration to learn about .coding-friend/config.json options