parley

A way to hand off your thinking — not a summary of it — to someone who can't be at the keyboard when you are. You work a problem through with an AI; it captures your full reasoning; then anyone you pass it to can walk that reasoning at their own depth, ask the AI "wait, why not X?", push down forks you never explored, and disagree — with you or with the AI. A decision is one thing that can come out of it, not the point. No meetings, no real-time, no backend, no recurring cost.

What it's for

The honest reframe: a summary keeps conclusions and drops the reasoning; a transcript keeps everything so nobody reads it; a meeting is lossy and one-shot. Parley is the medium that transmits the reasoning itself — walkably, at the recipient's chosen depth, with an expert at their elbow — and lets them extend it down paths you didn't take.

So it's for any time you've thought something through and need someone else to genuinely get there too, on their own time: a design decision, a findings report, a pitch, a hard call you want pressure-tested. The multi-person, async part is the delivery context; the value is the thinking-transmission. The agent is an active expert, not a scribe — it leans in when it spots a blind spot, stays quiet when the conversation is smooth, and never herds anyone to a conclusion.

How it works — two documents

1. The skill (.claude/skills/parley/SKILL.md) — the "product": the facilitation rules, the per-turn loop, the guardrails, and the artifact schema. Versioned and swappable. Contains no conversation content.
2. The artifact (parleys/<slug>.md) — one file per conversation, holding all the state. Self-describing and stamped with the skill version that produced it, so a cold agent with no memory can pick it up and resume.

This code/data split is the heart of the design: the tool can evolve without touching any live conversation, and a conversation can outlive any single session.

Using it

• Start one anywhere, no skill installed: paste the contents of .claude/skills/parley/SKILL.md into any AI chat and just say what you want to work out. The rules are self-contained, so it'll run the parley and hand you back an artifact to pass to whoever goes next.
• Start a parley: just tell the agent what you want to work out — a sentence or a brain-dump is plenty; it draws the rest out in conversation, no form to fill in. It creates the artifact (in parleys/<slug>.md when there's a filesystem), and that opening conversation is turn 1. You never touch a template.
• Continue one: point the agent at the parley — it finds it in parleys/, or you paste it in — and say who you are. It offers you a door rather than a lecture: the bottom line, a walk through the reasoning, or jump straight to an open fork and run with it — and you're free to disagree (with the author or the agent). When you're done, tell it to write up; then pass it to whoever goes next.
• Transport: paste/send the artifact however your team already communicates. A shared file location works too — it's the same thing with nicer storage.
• Non-installable surfaces (Slack/Chat): the agent can export the parley as a bundle — a single <slug>.bundle.md file holding a read-only copy of the skill plus the artifact — so someone with no skill installed can paste it in and pick up the conversation.

Layout

.claude/skills/parley/
  SKILL.md                      the facilitation skill (Document 1)
  references/
    artifact-template.md        blank artifact the agent starts from
    worked-example.md           a filled single-author, no-decision example
parleys/                        live conversation artifacts (Document 2 instances)

The name: parley — a talk across a divide between sides who aren't in the room together. It names the hand-off between people, whether or not it ends in agreement. Renaming is a one-line change in the skill frontmatter plus this file.