The stuck-unstick skill: break the loop with one sentence

You asked for a change. It came back wrong. You asked again and it came back differently wrong. Eight messages later the thing is worse than when you started and you're beginning to think you're bad at this.

You're in one of five traps, and each one has a specific way out. The stuck-unstick skill works out which one, says its name out loud, and then writes the exact message you send next, in your words, ready to copy. It doesn't touch your build. It fixes the conversation, which is what's actually broken.

Beginners feel noticeably better the moment the problem has a name. That's most of what this skill is for. You'll find it in our public freeskills repo, free like the rest of them.

Run these three lines from anywhere in your terminal.

Start a fresh session and the skill loads. That's the whole thing. No keys, no config.

Type /stuck-unstick. It starts by reminding you that nothing here is permanent, then asks two questions and waits: what you asked for in your own words, and what you got instead. Answer them plainly. It takes your answers at face value rather than interrogating you.

From that it names your trap in plain words and writes the next message for you in a copy-ready block, built around what you saw, what you want instead, the one thing to change, and how you'll know it worked. If the diagnosis is that the session itself has gone stale, it writes the handoff paragraph to paste into a fresh one so you don't lose the good parts. Everything gets appended to ~/build-log.md as a dated entry. One next action at the end: copy the sentence and send it.

The main use. Don't tidy up the story or make yourself sound reasonable. What you actually said and what actually came back is the diagnostic.

Sometimes the session is the problem. Forty messages and three abandoned directions later, the old wrong turns are still steering every answer. Starting fresh only works if you carry the good parts across.

Because it logs every diagnosis with a date, the pattern shows up over a few weeks. That's worth a look once you've got three or four entries in there.

Here is what the skill does to a loop, and why it is worth having open when one starts.

1. 1Hook: there's a brand new free Claude skill that takes you from eight messages deep and going backwards to the exact sentence that breaks the loop.
2. 2Mechanism: you tell it two things, what you asked for and what you got instead. It works out which of five traps you're in, like asking for too much at once, or describing the fix instead of what you actually saw on the screen. Then it names the trap out loud and writes your next message for you, word for word, ready to send.
3. 3Transformation: the loop that used to eat a whole evening ends in about five minutes, and you stop reading a bad session as evidence you can't do this. Five to ten rounds of describe, look, react is normal. That's what building actually looks like.
4. 4Close: grab it, it's free, and it's one of 55. This one gets you out of the loop. If you want the path that stops you landing in it so often, that's Claude Code Club at $9 a month. Link below.

Next time you feel the loop starting, stop at round three and run this instead of asking a fourth time. That's the whole move.