git:20261013.4e5c041 to git:20261014.0f16275

- > ⚠️ **STUB.** This skill has no working procedure yet. Before it can be invoked, fill in: which ref represents what is live, how a branch is cut from it, how the fix reaches production, how it gets reconciled back into the trunk, and where the record of it lives. Delete this banner once you have.

- Getting a fix in front of users **now**, when waiting for the normal release path is not acceptable — and doing it without leaving the branch topology in a state where the fix silently disappears later.

- It exists because "is the trunk safe to ship right now?" is a question you cannot always answer yes to. If the trunk has half-finished work on it, shipping from the trunk to fix one bug ships everything else too. The hotfix path is the answer to that, and it is *only* worth having if the project's trunk can be in that state.

- The whole point is to avoid carrying unrelated in-flight work. Cut from the ref that represents production — a branch, a tag, the deployed SHA — never from the trunk. Hydration must name that ref precisely.

- Whatever staged gauntlet the normal release runs, this skips most of it by design. Say explicitly which checks still apply. A hotfix that skips *everything* isn't fast, it's unreviewed.

- A fix that only exists on the production ref gets overwritten by the next ordinary release. Merging it back into the trunk is part of the procedure, not a follow-up someone might remember — and the skill should not report success until it's done or explicitly deferred with an owner.

- Hotfixes happen under time pressure and are the changes least likely to be written down. Decide where the record goes (a notes file, an issue, a PR that stays open until reconciled) and make writing it non-optional.

- The urgency that justifies the bypass applies to one fix. Anything that rides along on the branch inherits a review path it didn't earn. Keep the diff minimal and say so in the report.

- `/release` is the ordinary path this one deliberately steps around; hydrate that first, since this skill is defined by what it skips. `/squash-message` expects a hotfix body to be one or two paragraphs — short, not padded out to look substantial.