delegate-skills

Create your fleet of lanes. One orchestrator, the right implementer for every job.

Discover the implementer CLIs already installed on your machine, organize them into lanes like feature, tests, and ui, then delegate by lane — or choose one implementer directly. Either way, you keep the review and the commit.

npx skills add amElnagdy/delegate-skills

Then ask your orchestrating agent to create the fleet:

Use $delegate-setup to discover my installed implementer CLIs and create a fleet for feature, tests, and UI work.

Or delegate directly:

Use $codex-delegate to have Codex implement the refactor in services/billing/, then review and commit it.

flowchart LR
  S["$delegate-setup<br/>discover → propose → approve"] --> F["Example fleet"]
  O["Your orchestrator"] --> F
  F -->|"feature"| A["OpenCode"]
  F -->|"tests"| B["Codex"]
  F -->|"ui"| C["Cursor"]
  A --> R["Review the diff<br/>Run the gates"]
  B --> R
  C --> R
  R --> L["You land the commit"]

Choose how you delegate

Create a fleet

A fleet is your set of named lanes. Each lane binds a kind of work to one implementer and optional dials such as model, effort, or variant. Setup discovers what is available, proposes a compact fleet, shows you the complete configuration, and writes only after explicit approval.

Configuration can apply globally or to one repository. Once it is ready, dispatch with the matching *-delegate skill and --lane <name>. Explicit flags override lane dials, and the wrong implementer skill for a lane fails loud. Project config is content-bound to explicit setup approval, so cloned or edited project lanes fail closed until re-approved. See the delegate-fleet.v1 schema for paths, supported dials, and overlay behavior.

Delegate directly

Skip setup when you want one implementer or one-off dials. Pick the skill for a CLI you have:

Each skill name links to its SKILL.md, which owns that implementer's prerequisites, flags, and caveats. Building one for another CLI? Claim it first, then see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Install

Browse first:

npx skills add amElnagdy/delegate-skills --list

Install the package, the setup skill, or one implementer skill:

npx skills add amElnagdy/delegate-skills
npx skills add amElnagdy/delegate-skills --skill delegate-setup
npx skills add amElnagdy/delegate-skills --skill codex-delegate

To pin an installation, append an existing release tag as @vMAJOR.MINOR.PATCH. The Skills CLI installs by git ref, not by metadata.version in SKILL.md.

Install for a specific agent, or globally:

npx skills add amElnagdy/delegate-skills --skill codex-delegate --agent claude-code
npx skills add amElnagdy/delegate-skills --global

Works with any orchestrating agent the Skills CLI supports.

How delegation works

Whether you choose the implementer directly or through a fleet lane, every dispatch follows the same review-first loop:

1. Write a brief — self-contained task context; the implementer has no orchestrator chat history.
2. Dispatch it with the bundled relay.mjs.
3. Wait for completion — the relay writes a structured result.json.
4. Review the diff — re-run the project's gates yourself; pair with guard skills.
5. Land it — you commit, because committing belongs to the reviewer.

Use $claude-delegate to have a separate Claude Code session implement the parser fix, then review and commit it.
Use $opencode-delegate with --lane feature to implement the billing workflow, then review and commit it.
Use $codex-delegate to run this queue of migration tasks through Codex while I review each one.

Every relay speaks the same delegate-relay.result.v1 contract: status, exitCode, signal (with a host-killed hint when the OOM killer ends a run), the implementer's own final report, touchedFiles, and a session id where the CLI exposes one. Learn the loop once, swap the implementer freely.

You feel it when a bounded task — a migration, a mechanical refactor, a removal sweep — comes back as a clean diff with a structured report, and you land it after re-running the gates yourself instead of typing it all by hand.

What counts as an implementer skill

Four invariants hold for every *-delegate skill. They are also the bar for a new implementer:

• A separate CLI edits a real working tree, and the diff is the deliverable. Not an API wrapper, not a gateway — an implementer whose work you can read with git diff.
• The relay never commits. Committing belongs to the reviewer, always.
• Node built-ins only. No dependencies, no network calls of its own, no credentials, no telemetry. The relay launches its implementer CLI and git, plus the platform process launcher where a Windows shim or a process-tree kill needs one.
• Autonomy is stated in the CLI's own terms, and whatever it cannot enforce is said plainly — see the two footnotes above.

This is a loop, not a forwarder: a forwarder hands over one task and returns the output. Here you dispatch, poll, review, and land, across one task or a queue. It stays complementary to a vendor's own plugin or subagents — those coordinate inside one agent; this keeps the contract portable across orchestrators, with the commit on the reviewer.

delegate-setup is the setup-skill exception: it discovers CLIs and writes an approved fleet map, but never dispatches coding work.

Full checklist: CONTRIBUTING.md.

Requirements

• For a *-delegate skill, its implementer CLI authenticated as you would at the terminal. Each implementer skill's SKILL.md carries its own install and login commands.
• delegate-setup requires no implementer CLI; it discovers whichever ones are available.
• Node 18+ and git.
• An orchestrating agent that can run shell commands and read files.
• Shell examples assume bash/zsh (macOS/Linux, or Git Bash/WSL on Windows).

Trust and validation

This package is intentionally inspectable:

• All skill content is Markdown, plus small Node scripts. Each *-delegate skill has exactly one scripts/relay.mjs. The delegate-setup utility ships discover.mjs / config.mjs / lane.mjs (and a shared implementer table) instead of a relay — it never dispatches coding work.
• Those scripts make no network calls of their own, read or write no credentials, send no telemetry, and have no dependencies (Node built-ins only). Relays launch an implementer CLI and git, plus the platform process launcher/termination utility where a Windows shim or process-tree kill requires one. Discover may invoke installed CLIs for --version / model list probes (those CLIs may contact their own services). Read the script before you run it.
• None of the relays ever commit — committing is always the orchestrator's job, after review.

Verification status — claims here are backed by runs, not assumptions.

True of every relay: argument handling, exit codes, result.json shape, resume, and signal reporting are verified, along with each implementer-specific guard.

Per skill — platform, CLI version, and what the run exercised:

• agy-delegate — macOS, agy 1.0.16: headless edit run, --print= delivery, absolute --add-dir workspace pin.
• claude-delegate — macOS, claude 2.1.220: write run under acceptEdits; plan mode refusing an edit, with the Git tripwire true on a violation and false on a clean run; --session/--resume-last resume; claude_unavailable/127 and usage errors exiting 2 without a result file; deny rules and the shell sandbox blocking git commit, git push, git -C <dir> push, a nested claude, and a $HOME write.
• cursor-delegate — Windows, cursor-agent 2026.07.23-e383d2b: write run under --force; plan-mode --read-only touching nothing; --session <id> resume applying a delta brief; usage errors exiting 2. A maintainer-run native macOS plan-mode smoke against the same version captured model, session, and usage with no touched files.
• grok-delegate — macOS, grok 0.2.101: streaming-json report capture, file-based brief delivery, resume; read-only is best-effort by measurement, hence the violation flag.
• kimi-delegate — macOS, kimi 0.24.0: headless -p edit run, stream-json parsing, and both resume paths — the relay's --session/--resume-last, which drive Kimi's own --session and --continue.
• pi-delegate — macOS: stdin brief delivery, explicit provider and model selection, JSON session/provider/model/usage capture, and a --read-only run leaving a clean tree. Write, --session, and --resume-last runs are contributor-reported.
• qoder-delegate — macOS, qodercli 1.0.47, by the contributor: Lite edit run, accept_edits, explicit model and 32768-token context window, no commit.
• codex-delegate, opencode-delegate, vibe-delegate — contract-tested only: argument validation, bounded version preflight, missing binary, result parsing, and whole-process-tree timeout/abort cleanup. No end-to-end run is recorded here.
• delegate-setup — contract-tested: discover JSON shape, config validate/write/load, whole-lane project overlay, global write without creating .delegate/, and --lane resolve / wrong-skill / flag-override against relays. The smoke suite runs live discovery against installed CLIs (versions vary by machine). Native Windows discover smoke not yet claimed.

Not yet verified: native Windows launches for agy, claude, grok, kimi, pi, qoder, and vibe (the codex/opencode/grok .cmd shim handling is in place and quoted; Cursor serializes a pre-joined, quoted command; Qoder and Vibe target their documented native executables). Claude's own shell sandbox is unsupported on native Windows regardless of launch mechanics, and upstream Vibe officially targets UNIX. A native Linux cursor-agent run is unverified. The full delegate → review → commit loop is designed for and run on Claude Code; other orchestrators (Cursor, …) are designed-for but unproven.

Repository shape

Implementer skills share one shape; the setup utility has a different one:

skills/
├── <name>-delegate/
│   ├── SKILL.md
│   ├── scripts/relay.mjs
│   └── references/
│       ├── writing-the-brief.md
│       ├── dispatch-and-poll.md
│       ├── review-and-land.md
│       └── multi-task-queues.md
└── delegate-setup/
    ├── SKILL.md
    ├── scripts/
    │   ├── discover.mjs
    │   ├── config.mjs
    │   ├── lane.mjs
    │   └── implementers.mjs
    └── references/
        ├── schema.md
        └── setup-dialogue.md

Adding an implementer is a new directory plus two lines here: a table row, and a verification line once a run backs it.

Contributing? House rules, the controlled vocabulary, and the pre-publish checklist live in AGENTS.md — read it before opening a pull request, and point your agent at it too.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.