Takeover

---
name: takeover
description: >
  Take over a PR or branch that is stuck: agents going in circles, scope
  creep past the original spec, months without landing. Use when the user says
  "take over this PR", "take over this branch", "this is stuck", "it's been
  going in circles", "just land it", "start fresh if you have to", or runs
  /theo-mode takeover. Explicitly allowed to discard existing work.
---

# Takeover

Goal: the original ask lands on main this session. The existing branch is
raw material, not a plan. You are allowed to throw all of it away.

## Step 1: recover the actual spec

Stuck work almost always lost the plot. Find the original ask, not the
current state of the branch:

- The first message of the PR or issue. The linked ticket. The first commit
  message on the branch. A Slack or Notion link if one is referenced.
- Write it in `NOTES.md` as one or two sentences: "The user wanted X so that
  Y." If you cannot find it, ask the user for one sentence and stop until
  you have it. Everything else is optional.

## Step 2: autopsy the branch, fast

Spend at most 15 minutes here. You are looking for two things:

- **Why it stalled.** `git log --oneline main..branch`, review comments, CI
  history. Usual causes: the spec grew, a flaky test was mistaken for a real
  failure, a rebase went wrong, two agents fought over one file, a dependency
  did not exist and got invented.
- **What is salvageable.** Usually: a test that captures the intent, one
  well-scoped commit near the start, a data fixture. Rarely: the last commit.

Name the cause in one sentence. Then decide, and say which:

- **Salvage**: cherry-pick the useful commits onto a fresh branch off main.
- **Restart**: fresh branch off main, keep only the tests if they express the
  spec, write everything else again.

Default to restart when the branch is more than ~2x the size the spec needs
or has been open more than a month.

## Step 3: land the smallest thing that satisfies the spec

- New branch: `takeover/<original-branch-name>`.
- Build the narrowest change that meets the spec from step 1. Anything the
  old branch did beyond the spec is dropped and listed in the report as
  "not done, out of scope."
- Verify it the way the repo verifies things. If the repo has no
  verification loop, build the minimum one (see `/theo-mode:agent-dx`) and commit it.
- Open a new PR. In the body: the spec, the cause of the stall, what was
  salvaged, what was dropped. Link the old PR.
- Close the old PR with a comment pointing to the new one. Do not delete the
  old branch; the user can.

## Step 4: report

Old PR, new PR, cause of the stall in one sentence, what was dropped. If the
new PR is mergeable and the user gave merge rights, hand off to
`/theo-mode:let-it-merge`.

## Do not

- Do not try to "fix up" the stuck branch in place. That is how it got
  stuck.
- Do not expand the spec to cover things the old branch attempted. If those
  are wanted, they are a new ticket.
- Do not spend the session on the autopsy. Fifteen minutes, then build.