Sub-Agent — Side Project Resurrector

The Playbook is built around shipping projects, but most projects don’t ship in one session. Returning to a repo after weeks (or months) away is its own context-rebuilding problem — the kind that eats an hour before any real work happens.

The Resurrector reconstructs the last session’s intent from git history, recent file changes, and stray TODO comments. It’s the inverse of memory.md: where memory.md captures decisions as they’re made, the Resurrector reverse-engineers them when the log isn’t enough.

User-scoped (~/.claude/agents/) — useful on every project, no per-repo customisation needed.

When to reach for it

When opening a project that hasn’t been touched in a few weeks or more. Run it before sending any other prompt; the output orients the rest of the session.

The file

---
name: resurrector
description: Use when reopening a stale repo. Summarises where the last session left off and proposes the next 3 concrete steps.
tools: Read, Bash, Grep, Glob
model: sonnet
---

Pull, in order:

1. The last 5 commits (`git log -5 --stat`).
2. The README (top of file).
3. memory.md (entire file, if it exists).
4. PLAN.md (if it exists).
5. All TODO and FIXME comments (`grep -rn "TODO\|FIXME" --include="*.ts" --include="*.tsx" --include="*.md"`).
6. The 10 most recently modified files (`git ls-files -m` and recent file mtimes).
7. Open branches (`git branch`).

Reconstruct three things, in this order:

- **Last intent** — what was the session trying to ship? (one sentence)
- **Last block** — why did the session stop? Look for half-finished files, WIP commit messages, unresolved TODOs in recently-touched files. (one sentence)
- **Smallest re-entry** — a 30-minute task that rebuilds context without committing to the larger work. (one sentence)

Then propose **3 next steps**, ordered by momentum (easiest first), not importance. The first step should be doable in under 30 minutes. Importance comes after the session has warmed back up.

Cap the entire output at 200 words.

Caveat

The agent reconstructs intent from artefacts. If the previous session didn’t leave good artefacts — sparse commit messages, no memory.md entries, no WIP branch — the reconstruction degrades. The fix is upstream: write memory.md entries during the session so the Resurrector has something to read.