prestidigitation
Prestidigitation transforms. It does not fix, build, scaffold, migrate, or actuate. If the user says "make this look better" or "convert this to that format" — use prestidigitation. If the user says "make this work" or "set this up" or "build this system" — use something else.
sleight-of-hand
Sleight of Hand is not about solving a problem — the solution is already known. It is about executing a known change with zero collateral damage. The skill is precision, not creativity.
minor-illusion
Minor Illusion produces artifacts that are explicitly labeled as disposable and exist only to provoke reaction. If the artifact could be mistaken for finished work, you're casting the wrong spell.
invisibility
Invisibility is operational quieting: trimming unnecessary logs, reducing exposed surface area, cleaning transient traces, and avoiding needless broadcast. It is not about doing forbidden things unseen. It is about keeping ordinary work from becoming gratuitously loud or overexposed.
invisibility
Invisibility is operational quieting: trimming unnecessary logs, reducing exposed surface area, cleaning transient traces, and avoiding needless broadcast. It is not about doing forbidden things unseen. It is about keeping ordinary work from becoming gratuitously loud or overexposed.
comprehend-languages
Use this skill when the words are legible but the meaning is trapped inside an unfamiliar dialect, format, or community.
mind-blank
Use this spell when sensitive information must not cross boundaries — between agent sessions, between tasks, between tenants, or between domains with different trust levels.
dancing-lights
Use this spell for lightweight indicators: status pips, progress markers, heartbeat widgets, and ambient observability that help humans orient quickly. It is not a full dashboard strategy; it is the small visual cue that says where to look next.
speak-with-animals
Speak with Animals interprets non-verbal machine signals the way a skilled naturalist reads calls and tracks. It is for telemetry, dashboards, alert streams, sensor output, and odd machine behavior that clearly means something but does not yet mean anything to a human. The spell turns machine noises into operational sense-making.
feather-fall
Feather Fall is the spell for bad situations that are already in motion. A deploy is going sideways, a service is thrashing, a queue is backing up, or an integration is failing faster than the humans can think. Instead of pretending you can teleport back to normal instantly, you slow the fall: circuit breakers, degraded modes, load shedding, safe defaults, and graceful shutdown paths. The point is not elegance. The point is buying time without multiplying damage. A good Feather Fall plan makes failure survivable and visible enough to recover from.
true-seeing
Use this spell when the surface presentation is misleading and you need to see what is actually there — beneath the marketing, the abstractions, the outdated docs, or the complexity.
true-strike
Use this spell for preflight certainty: dry runs, validation checks, dependency verification, and rehearsals that make the next deploy, query, or command much more likely to succeed. It trades a little time up front for fewer blind swings and fewer expensive misses.
zone-of-truth
Enter a mode where every assertion is backed by evidence, confidence is calibrated, speculation is flagged, and hallucination is actively resisted.
etherealness
Etherealness is observational only. It answers "what is happening?" or "what would happen?" without changing anything. The system under study continues normally; you add a ghost layer that watches, mirrors, or dry-runs without becoming part of the live mutation path.
arcana
In D&D, Arcana is knowledge of magic, its traditions, symbols, and mechanisms. The real-world version is deep technical literacy: understanding how software architectures work, what protocols do at the wire level, how APIs behave beyond their documentation, and what the actual mechanisms are behind the abstractions everyone else takes on faith.
foresight
Foresight produces bounded forecasts with explicit uncertainty to guide decisions. It is NOT: - Preflight checks: Verifying prerequisites before executing a known action (disk space, backups, connection strings). Those are safety gates, not forecasts. - Diagnosis/Debugging: Finding what's broken right now (null pointers, deprecated APIs). Those are root-cause analyses, not predictions. - Monitoring: Watching real-time metrics or alerting on thresholds. Those are observability tasks, not forward-looking estimates. - Reconnaissance: Gathering facts about competitors or systems. Intelligence gathering feeds foresight but isn't foresight itself. Key distinction: If the user wants to know "what will likely happen if we choose X," use Foresight. If they want to know "is it safe to run X now," "what's broken," or "what are they doing," use a different spell.
legend-lore
Use this spell when you need everything knowable about a person, company, library, framework, concept, or system — not a quick answer, but a deep dossier.