The Halyard team wrote a project slash command called audit-deps, expecting it to run its dependency audit away from whatever else is in the session. An engineer invokes it 60 turns into a long debugging conversation about a caching bug, and the resulting audit cites files that were read during that debugging thread and repeats a conclusion reached there. The command body itself mentions none of those files. What explains the outcome?
- AThe command frontmatter omitted Grep from its allowed tools, so the model fell back on files that had already been read earlier in the conversation.
- BCommand bodies are cached per session after their first use, so this invocation replayed output that was captured during the earlier debugging work.
- CA slash command body is expanded into the current conversation, so the audit runs with everything already in that context rather than starting from a clean one. Correct
- DSubagent dispatch and slash command invocation share a single context window by design, so no configuration can give the audit a context of its own.
Why A is wrong: Tempting because a narrowed tool list can genuinely change how a command gathers evidence, but a missing search tool would explain thin coverage, not the presence of a prior conclusion that no tool call produced.
Why B is wrong: Tempting because caching is a real mechanism elsewhere on the platform, but command bodies are not replayed from earlier output, and this was the first invocation of the command in the session.
Why C is correct: Correct: invoking a command substitutes its body as a prompt in the running session, so every file and conclusion already present remains visible to the model handling the audit.
Why D is wrong: Tempting because it describes the command half accurately, but it is wrong about subagents: one dispatched with the Task tool does get its own context, which is the mechanism to reach for when isolation is the requirement.