`ce-promote`

Turn a shipped feature into copy-pasteable, user-facing announcement copy — right inside the engineering workflow. Spiral-agnostic by default; voice-matched when the Spiral CLI is installed.

ce-promote is the post-ship messaging skill. After a feature merges, it figures out what shipped, picks the right channels, and drafts the announcement copy — an X post or thread, a one-line changelog blurb, a LinkedIn post, an email, a blog intro, a short demo script. It produces good copy with nothing installed, and uses the Spiral CLI for brand-voice-matched drafts when it's present and authed.

It drafts only. It never posts, publishes, commits, or opens PRs — shipping the copy is a human action.

TL;DR

Question	Answer
What does it do?	Summarizes what shipped, picks channels, drafts announcement copy, presents it for review
When to use it	Right after a feature ships and you want the user-facing messaging drafted in-workflow
What it produces	Copy-pasteable drafts, labeled by channel — never an auto-post
Spiral	Optional enhancement: voice-matched drafts when the CLI is ready; otherwise offers setup once, then drafts with a lite layer of editorial & social expertise

The Problem

Messaging usually waits for a separate marketing pass, so it lags the ship — and the engineer who has the most context on the user value isn't the one who writes the copy. When announcement copy is written ad hoc, it tends toward AI tells ("We're thrilled to announce…"), hashtag spam, and implementation-speak instead of user value.

The Solution

ce-promote drafts the copy at ship time, from ship context:

Derives what shipped from a free-form description, or from the merged PR, the diff, the changelog, and recent commits — then summarizes the user-facing value, not the code.
Picks channels sensibly (an X post + a changelog blurb by default) and scales to what the user asks for and what the change warrants.
Drafts voice-matched copy via Spiral when ready; when not, offers setup once (sign in or install), and on a decline draws on a lite layer of editorial & social-media fundamentals to draft strong channel-specific copy on its own.
Presents drafts for review — copy-pasteable, labeled by channel, never posted.

What Makes It Novel

1. Spiral as a subtle, optional enhancement — never a dependency

Spiral is detected into three states (which spiral + spiral auth status --json): ready, installed-but-unauthed, or absent. When ready, drafts are voice-matched to the user's brand and persist to their Spiral account (each draft carries a web-app url for tweaking). When not ready, the skill offers setup once — if installed but unauthed the agent runs spiral login and shares the sign-in link (you approve in a browser — the API key never touches the agent); if absent it points to the one-step install command — and a decline is always fine: it falls back to a lite layer of editorial & social-media expertise to draft strong copy on its own, and records the opt-out so it never nags again. The skill is equally useful with or without Spiral.

2. The multi-channel / cue-word gotcha is encoded

Spiral's multi-channel behavior is phrasing-driven, not flag-driven, and it has a sharp edge the skill handles explicitly:

N variations of one channel → ask for "3 tweet options", avoid cue words (campaign, across, multi-channel, everywhere, cross-post), and pass --num-drafts 3. A stray cue word trips campaign mode and collapses output to a single draft, silently ignoring --num-drafts.
A real cross-channel set → name the channels in the prompt; Spiral returns a set of drafts per channel — it decides the count, often several — and --num-drafts is ignored. One call produces the whole cross-channel set.

3. Drafts only — posting is always human

The skill never posts, schedules, publishes, commits, or opens a PR. Output is always review-ready drafts. This keeps a human in the loop for the one action that's outward-facing and hard to reverse.

4. User value over implementation

The "what shipped" summary describes what a user can now do and why they'd care — never the serializer or endpoint that made it possible. Direct drafting bans AI tells, throat-clearing, and hashtag spam, and matches length/tone to each channel.

Quick Example

You merge a PR adding one-click CSV export.

Single-channel variations: /ce-promote 3 tweet options for the new one-click CSV export → the skill summarizes the value, then (Spiral path) runs spiral write "3 tweet options for one-click CSV export" --instant --num-drafts 3 --json with no cue words, or (no-Spiral path) writes three distinct tweets directly. All three are presented as copy-pasteable blocks.

Cross-channel set: /ce-promote draft a launch across X, LinkedIn, and email → (Spiral path) spiral write "announcing one-click CSV export — a launch across X, LinkedIn, and email" --instant --json returns a set of drafts per channel (Spiral decides the count); (no-Spiral path) the skill drafts one X post, one LinkedIn post, and one email directly. Every returned draft is labeled by channel and ready to copy.

When to Reach For It

Reach for ce-promote when:

A feature just shipped and you want the announcement drafted before context fades
You need cross-channel copy (tweet + LinkedIn + email) from one prompt
You want voice-matched copy and have Spiral installed

Skip it when:

Nothing user-facing shipped (internal refactor, CI-only, test-only)
You only need internal release history — use GitHub Releases for plugin release history

Reference

Argument	Effect
(empty)	Derives what shipped from PR/diff/changelog/commits; drafts the default channel set
`<description>`	Free-form description of what shipped, used as the source of truth
`<channels>`	e.g., "a tweet thread and a LinkedIn post", "3 tweet options", "a launch across X, LinkedIn, and email"

Detailed Spiral CLI mechanics live in the skill's references/spiral-cli.md.

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ce-promote