Anything without a leading slash

This reference only covers commands genuinely built into tCode itself. Anything else you type, a description of a task, a question about your code, a pasted error message, is not a command at all.

It is sent straight to tAI as a normal message and handled through the ordinary tool-use loop described in The chat loop, exactly like any other request.

This is why there is no need to prefix a normal request with anything special; the leading slash is specifically what marks a message as a command rather than a request, and only these built-in commands use it.

This split is unambiguous in practice: a leading slash is not a natural way to start an ordinary sentence, so there is essentially no real risk of a normal request being mistaken for an attempted command, or vice versa.

If you do accidentally start a real request with a slash, the resulting error naming the unrecognized command makes the mistake obvious immediately, rather than the message being silently misinterpreted as something else.