A city deploy skill needs the service name, but engineers often invoke it with no arguments. What frontmatter helps?

In a city deploy skill workflow, engineers often slash-invoke the skill without supplying the service name the skill needs to target. Argument-hint frontmatter is the Claude Code mechanism that surfaces required or expected parameters at invocation time, nudging the engineer to provide the service identifier before the skill proceeds with municipal deploy steps. That keeps the shared skill usable across many services without baking every service name into always-on project instructions.

Argument-hint works because it is invocation-time guidance attached to the skill itself. When someone fires the deploy skill empty-handed, the hint prompts for the missing service name so the skill can resolve the correct environment, health checks, and rollout path for that civic service. The team still shares one skill definition in version control; only the per-run argument changes.

Removing the skill and hard-coding every service name into root CLAUDE.md fails by concept because CLAUDE.md is always-loaded project guidance, not a substitute for parameterized on-demand workflows. Enumerating every service there bloats context, drifts when services are added or retired, and turns a deploy skill into static prose. Setting context: fork only addresses isolation of skill context, not collection of missing parameters—forking never asks the engineer for the service name. Putting the skill under user scope so teammates never see argument guidance fails because deploy is a shared municipal workflow; user scope hides the skill from the team and does not solve empty invocations for collaborators who need the same deploy path.

Exam caveat: distinguish argument-hint (parameter prompting on skill invoke) from context: fork (context isolation) and from skill scope (user versus project). Operational check: invoke the city deploy skill with no arguments and confirm the argument-hint prompts for the service name; then invoke with an explicit service name and confirm the skill proceeds without unnecessary prompting.