a commander starts its own conversation, instead of being handed one

Starting a commander meant writing a good opening prompt, which is the hard part
of the whole thing — so in practice somebody else wrote it and pasted it in. That
is not a flow, it is a person acting as the intake form.

Now the two decisions that cannot be guessed stay with the owner (a name and a
working directory) and the rest is a button. It sends a brief the MODEL reads —
"I have not told you what I want yet, orient yourself and ask me one question" —
while the transcript shows "Set me up.", which is what a person would have typed.
That split is `effectivePrompt` vs `displayText` and the chat path already had it.

What to ask, in what order, and to read the directory BEFORE asking anything, all
live in the Commanders skill under "When you started yourself". Deliberately not
here: capabilities are re-read from disk every run, so rewording a question costs
nothing, while the same words in commander-block.ts cost a restart each time. The
block carries a pointer and no doctrine.

Orienting first is what makes this work on a real request. Told "automate the
platform deploys", a commander that has read the directory finds `deploy/`, the
previous releases and the deploy skill, and asks whether that is still how you
want it — instead of inventing a scheme next to the one already there.

`sendPrompt` gained an options object rather than a tenth positional parameter.
Nine is already past where a call site reads as a row of undefineds.

The composer stays enabled beside the button: typing your own opener still works,
it just is not the only way in any more.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

src/servers/api/chat/websocket.ts

@@ -788,6 +788,11 @@ async function handleChat(
   msg: {
     prompt: string;
     displayText?: string;
+    /**
+     * The owner pressed Start instead of typing an opener — see `commanderBlock`. Carried on the message
+     * rather than derived, because the only thing that can know it is the client that rendered the button.
+     */
+    selfStarted?: boolean;
     sessionId?: string;
     model?: string;
     cwd?: string;
@@ -941,6 +946,11 @@ export async function startClaudeTurn(params: {
   msg: {
     prompt: string;
     displayText?: string;
+    /**
+     * The owner pressed Start instead of typing an opener — see `commanderBlock`. Carried on the message
+     * rather than derived, because the only thing that can know it is the client that rendered the button.
+     */
+    selfStarted?: boolean;
     groupSlug?: string;
     context?: string;
     contextId?: string;
@@ -980,6 +990,7 @@ export async function startClaudeTurn(params: {
     const block = await commanderBlock({
       userId,
       sessionId: transcriptIdBySessionKey.get(sessionId) ?? msg.resumeSessionId ?? null,
+      selfStarted: msg.selfStarted === true,
     });
     if (block) {
       briefedSessions.add(sessionId);
@@ -1147,6 +1158,11 @@ async function handleClaudeCodeChat(
   msg: {
     prompt: string;
     displayText?: string;
+    /**
+     * The owner pressed Start instead of typing an opener — see `commanderBlock`. Carried on the message
+     * rather than derived, because the only thing that can know it is the client that rendered the button.
+     */
+    selfStarted?: boolean;
     groupSlug?: string;
     context?: string;
     contextId?: string;
@@ -1170,6 +1186,11 @@ async function handleOpenCodeChat(
   msg: {
     prompt: string;
     displayText?: string;
+    /**
+     * The owner pressed Start instead of typing an opener — see `commanderBlock`. Carried on the message
+     * rather than derived, because the only thing that can know it is the client that rendered the button.
+     */
+    selfStarted?: boolean;
     groupSlug?: string;
     context?: string;
     contextId?: string;