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Use cases

Three ways to use Guild

Concrete scenarios grounded in real commands and real artifacts. Each shows what you type and what Guild does.

01

Build a Feature End-to-End

What you do

terminal
$ /guild "Build a Stripe subscription flow, add tests, update the docs, draft a launch email."

What Guild does

  1. Brainstorm drafts the spec and surfaces payment-flow ambiguities for you to resolve.

  2. Team-compose proposes architect, backend, qa, technical-writer, and copywriter — you approve.

  3. Plan writes per-specialist lanes with depends-on: ordering.

  4. Each specialist receives a lean context bundle and executes; the backend, qa, and technical-writer lanes run against the same codebase in sequence.

  5. Review checks output against the approved spec. Verify confirms tests pass and scope is met.

  6. The copywriter lane produces the launch email draft in the same run — no separate invocation.

Specialist teams diagram: Guild proposes architect, backend, qa, technical-writer, and copywriter for a feature build — you approve the team before any work starts.
Guild proposes the team — you approve, swap, or skip specialists before the plan is written.
02

Orient Guild in a New Codebase

What you do

terminal
$ /guild init

Run this in an unfamiliar codebase before starting work.

What Guild does

  1. Guild runs a cheap-tier scan of the repo and writes a codebase-map.json and an architecture-map.md stub under .guild/.

  2. Synthesized knowledge lands in .guild/wiki/.

  3. Every subsequent run assembles each specialist's context bundle from that knowledge base — later specialists start informed rather than scanning from scratch.

Note: The full knowledge-graph pipeline (onboarding docs, diff artifacts, deep graph) runs only under /guild init --learn or when defaults.auto_learn is set in settings.json. The default init scan is lightweight.

Memory and Recall flow: /guild init writes synthesized knowledge to .guild/wiki/; subsequent runs load that wiki into each specialist's context bundle — no re-scanning.
/guild init accumulates project knowledge — every subsequent run starts informed.
03

Run a Release

What you do

terminal
$ /guild "Prepare and ship v2.1 — changelog, qa sign-off, deployment smoke-test."

What Guild does

  1. Brainstorm captures the release scope and open blockers.

  2. Team-compose proposes devops, qa, and technical-writer.

  3. The qa lane runs the test suite and writes a quality report under .guild/runs/<run-id>/quality/.

  4. The technical-writer lane drafts the changelog.

  5. The devops lane covers deployment verification.

  6. Review and verify confirm release criteria. Every artifact — spec, plan, handoff envelopes, review — is written durably to .guild/ for the record.

Guild 7-step lifecycle diagram applied to a release run: brainstorm captures scope, execute dispatches devops/qa/technical-writer in depends-on order, review and verify confirm release criteria.
Every artifact from the release run — spec, plan, handoffs, review — is written to .guild/ for the record.

Ready to run Guild?

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