Eleven Instruments, One Command

Coherence started as two slash commands bolted onto Claude Code. Check your content. Check your drift. Useful, but scattered — you had to remember which command did what, and the boundary between them was blurry enough that people kept running the wrong one.

v1.6 collapses everything into a single /coherence command with 11 subcommands. One entry point. One mental model. Four questions that cover the full lifecycle of keeping a project coherent.

The Four Questions

Every subcommand answers one of these:

Where am I? — init, status, uninstall. Lifecycle management. Set up guardrails for a new project, check what’s active, or remove everything cleanly.

What do I have? — hook, spec, config. Inspection. See your active hooks, read your generated spec documents, examine your configuration. No guessing what Coherence installed or where.

What happened? — history. Forensic. Review what hooks fired, what they caught, and what got corrected. Useful when something changed and you want to know why.

Am I still on track? — check-principles, check-drift, test-runner. Verification. The active checks. Principles validates content against your style rules. Drift compares code against spec documents. Test-runner exercises Coherence’s own hooks to make sure they still work.

Plus help, because even 11 subcommands need a reference card.

Why This Matters

The old two-command model worked for us — we built it for this site. But it assumed you already understood the conceptual split between drift and consistency. New users didn’t. They’d run /check-drift expecting it to catch spelling errors, or /check-consistency expecting it to validate their architecture.

The four-question framework eliminates that confusion. You don’t need to know Coherence’s internals. You just need to know what you’re asking: Where am I? What do I have? What happened? Am I still on track?

For the full walkthrough — every subcommand, with examples — see Clearing the Fog on the Coherence site. For the architectural thinking behind why guardrails matter, read Entropy at Velocity.

Or just try it. Three steps:

1. /plugin marketplace add viewyonder/coherence
2. /plugin install coherence (select user scope)
3. /coherence init in your repo

Full walkthrough at coherence.viewyonder.com/getting-started.