Critical Rule

Never answer from memory or general knowledge about Vellum. Always go to a source of truth. This skill contains zero static information — only pointers to where the truth lives.

Sources of Truth

1. The assistant CLI — Live Runtime State

The CLI is the single source of truth for anything about the running assistant's current state.

Run assistant --help or assistant <command> --help to discover more.

"Is X connected?" has two answers and a service can have either, both, or neither. It takes both commands: the providers list is a catalog and says nothing about whether anything is connected, so use it to find which provider keys belong to X, then check each with oauth status.

Each provider in that list carries its sense: actsAs in the CLI's JSON, acts_as over HTTP. user means the assistant can act as the person who authorized it, assistant means a bot people reach the assistant through. Report the sense found rather than a bare yes.

Do not infer the sense from the provider key. slack and discord name the user integration while their bots are slack_channel and discord_channel, yet telegram is itself the bot. Some services offer both from one authorize URL, so having done one is not evidence of the other, and people often cannot recall which they did.

channels list reports delivery health for channels that have a readiness probe, which is not all of them. It answers whether a channel is working, not whether something is connected.

2. Vellum Docs Site — Conceptual Knowledge

For "what is", "how does", and "why" questions, fetch the relevant page from the docs site. Base URL: https://www.vellum.ai/docs

Use web_fetch to pull the page content. If a URL 404s, try fetching the docs homepage and navigating from the sidebar.

3. Source Code — Deep Implementation Details

For questions the docs and CLI can't answer (internal architecture, how a specific feature is implemented, source-level details):

1. Get the current version: assistant --version
2. The open source repo is at https://github.com/vellum-ai/vellum-assistant
3. The release for version X is at https://github.com/vellum-ai/vellum-assistant/releases/tag/vX.Y.Z
4. Check out the matching tag locally: cd /workspace/vellum-assistant && git fetch --tags && git checkout v<version>
5. Key source locations:
   • assistant/ — Runtime (conversation loop, tool dispatch, memory, scheduling)
   • gateway/ — Ingress boundary (webhooks, Telegram, Twilio, reverse proxy)
   • clients/ — Native macOS client
   • skills/ — Bundled skill definitions
   • ARCHITECTURE.md — Cross-system index
   • assistant/ARCHITECTURE.md — Runtime internals
   • gateway/ARCHITECTURE.md — Gateway internals
   • assistant/docs/architecture/ — Detailed architecture docs (security, memory, etc.)
6. Read the relevant source files to answer the question.

Resolution Order

1. CLI first — if the question is about current state, config, or capabilities, the CLI has it.
2. Docs second — if the question is conceptual ("what is X", "how does Y work"), fetch the docs page.
3. Source code last — only for deep implementation questions that the docs don't cover.

Details