openrig

Use when a person in their own Claude Code or Codex session mentions OpenRig, rigs or the rig command, or wants a team of coding agents (Claude Code, Codex) on their project. That includes installing, setting up, starting or updating OpenRig, seeing, getting back to or re-attaching to their OpenRig agents (including bringing a stopped team back), TUI or operator, starting or sharing a team, and joining this session to one. Operating a running rig from inside it (fleet recovery, seat handover, watchdog wakes, in-rig upgrades) is the openrig-skills skill.

Use when creating, refreshing, packaging, inspecting, promoting, or deprecating a named per-seat starting point — Agent Starter manifest authoring, the 6-state lifecycle (captured → named → inspectable → used → promoted → deprecated), provenance honesty, and refusal rules. NOT a VM image; a managed starting point composed from agent role + startup context + optional native session source + provenance.

Use when designing or auditing how an agent becomes useful after launch — AGENTS.md overlays, role files, skills, rig specs, workflow specs, startup checklists, refocus messages, "rig context" surface. Covers the 4 failure modes that make startup context fail (old rig spec misses current operating mode; current agents never told about new guidance; startup file as dumping ground; orchestrator transmits implementation without preserving product intent).

Use when addressing a registered remote OpenRig host, choosing its transport, or interpreting a cross-host result.

Use when classifying a slice closeout (auto-continue / human gate / park), routing a real decision to a human, or designing a human queue/dashboard surface. Treats humans as durable network participants with attention surfaces, queues, and decision records — escalation lands as a durable attention item, not a chat message. Approval is NOT required for every clean closeout; the default RSI conveyor continues unless an explicit human gate is reached.

Use when project policy calls for a human decision or update, a human delivery is pending or failed, or a reply must resume the right work.

Use when designing multi-agent topologies that run ON OpenRig — authoring RigSpec and AgentSpec files for new rigs, creating agent startup content (guidance / skills / culture), or diagnosing why a launched rig's agents aren't behaving as intended. NOT for changing OpenRig itself (use developing-openrig); NOT for ordinary CLI operation of an existing rig (use openrig-user). Covers the full authoring lifecycle from user intent to validated, launchable rig.

Use when opening OpenRig fleet terminals into cmux — turning a rig, pod, mission, slice, or saved view into live agent tiles via `rig terminal --provider cmux`, or driving cmux on an agent's request. Same OpenRig view semantics as openrig-herdr (the verbs, honest-partial/degrade, read-only cross-rig, scroll/copy, same-size-only duplicates); cmux is the **best-effort** provider (herdr is the default and the proof-gated one). Prefer openrig-herdr unless cmux is specifically wanted.

Use when opening OpenRig fleet terminals as a herdr wall — turning a rig, pod, mission, slice, or saved view into live interactive agent tiles via `rig terminal`, watching another rig read-only, or driving herdr on an agent's request ("open all my rigs + a mission as views"). Covers the `rig terminal open|views|status` verbs, the honest-partial/degrade reading of the result, the read-only-by-construction rail for cross-rig views, scroll/copy out of the box, and the same-size-only duplicate-pane limit. herdr is the default, proof-gated provider.

Use when an agent running inside OpenRig needs the right skill or context for fleet recovery, seat handover, new-seat orientation, a watchdog wake, cross-host reach to an agent on another machine, rig packaging, an OpenRig upgrade, systematic debugging, queue triage, or implementation planning; also when the agent doesn't know what applies or nothing is projected on cold boot. Installing, starting or updating OpenRig, getting back to a team or bringing a stopped one back from a person's own session is the rigs skill.

Use when a user wants a continuing software team for a real repository, or has a first OpenRig team and needs a repeatable path for reviewed work and later tasks.

Use when an agent is preparing or performing an OpenRig CLI/daemon upgrade and must preserve live seats, verify each mutation, or reconcile managed plugin and skill files without overwriting local work.

Use when authoring or installing a rig bundle (packaged, shareable artifact that instantiates an opinionated OpenRig topology + workflow), reasoning about the bundle vs extension boundary, or auditing a bundle for portability. Covers the 4 failure modes that prevent bundles from working anywhere but the operator's machine, and the inspect-before-install discipline.

Use when reasoning about the rig lifecycle operations family (create / start / stop / resume / restore / snapshot / release / unclaim / destroy), reading or trusting `rig ps` / lifecycle projections after recovery, or designing proof for a lifecycle scenario. Covers the 4 failure modes (auto-restore creates partial rig; projections report healthier than reality; provider auth treated as impl work; resume succeeds for one runtime fails another) plus the restore-honesty rule (failed resume is FAILED loudly — no auto fresh fallback).

Use when authoring a rig spec member or `rig expand` payload that needs to start a new managed seat from a prior runtime conversation source — `session_source: { mode: fork, ref: { kind, value } }`. v1 supports `mode: fork` with `ref.kind: native_id` for Claude and Codex. The new seat persists a NEW post-fork token; the parent token is NEVER written onto the new seat. NOT for restoring an existing seat or for artifact-backed mental-model rebuild.

Use when authoring rig specs, agent specs, workflow specs, startup/context fragments, operating-mode declarations, or designing the user spec library. Covers the 4 failure modes (spec instantiates topology but not workflow/mode; spec depends on local paths and fails on another host; agents modify specs as one-off files instead of preserving reusable intent; validation proves YAML shape but not whether topology can run) and the validation-vs-runtime-realization distinction.

Use when changing a rig while it is alive — `rig grow` / `rig expand` / `rig shrink` / `rig launch` / `rig remove` / `rig discover` / `rig bind` / `rig adopt` / `rig attach`. Covers the 4 failure modes (newly created seat lacks queue/startup/role; edges and permissions not updated; adopt/bind succeeds at tmux but not OpenRig identity; shrink/remove leaves stale topology references) and the rule that mutation must work while the rig is active, not just in clean fixtures.

Use when configuring `rig watchdog` policies, authoring wake/refocus/alignment-checkpoint messages, or choosing the right intervention level for a stale-owner situation. The 3-level continuity-check stack (wake / refocus / alignment-checkpoint), the discipline that prevents cadence pollution and bureaucracy theater, and the artifact-pool loop-edge pattern for evidence-aware waking.

Use when you are a person's coding agent in an app such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or VS Code, connected through the OpenRig MCP server, and the person wants their OpenRig team to do some work, wants to know how that work is going, has a question from the team to answer, or wants to read what the team returned.

Quickly capture product ideas, feature requests, or insights from meetings and conversations. Rapid documentation with smart categorization and deduplication.

Gather and distill context from meetings, competitors, regulatory sources, and internal discussions. Produces background.md for a feature and updates shared context docs when new knowledge is discovered.

Generate a 1-2 page executive summary for a feature — orients sales, leadership, and engineering from a single document.

YC-style product validation using six forcing questions. Pressure-tests a feature idea before it becomes a requirement — ensuring real demand, a clear wedge, and evidence behind assumptions.

Multi-perspective review of a feature plan or requirements doc before development begins. Evaluates from strategy, design/UX, and engineering angles to catch gaps early.

Use when converting PM intake into a slice SPEC.md with observable acceptance outcomes, explicit scope, and advisory sibling build dependencies.

Create UI mockups at three fidelity levels — ASCII wireframes for quick iteration, standalone HTML mockups for delivery with requirements, and live prototypes for interaction testing.

Use when a development pod begins or hands off implementation, QA, or design work.

Use when coordinating assignments, selected review boundaries, or blocked work across a rig.

Use when you are a seat on the oversight pod (a standing monitor-mode rig that keeps OTHER rigs healthy), configuring or running the drift detectors, or choosing whether to intervene vs escalate. Covers the pull-not-poll posture, the v0 detectors (premature-park, process-drift, off-task, token-burn), the intervention ladder (orchestrator-ping -> refocus -> human escalation), and the cheap+deep model economics. NOT for orchestrating your OWN rig (orchestration-team) and NOT the intervention primitive mechanics (watchdog).

Use when assigned a review or when an authored review boundary is reached.

Browser automation CLI for AI agents. Use when the user needs to interact with websites, including navigating pages, filling forms, clicking buttons, taking screenshots, extracting data, testing web apps, or automating any browser task. Triggers include requests to "open a website", "fill out a form", "click a button", "take a screenshot", "scrape data from a page", "test this web app", "login to a site", "automate browser actions", or any task requiring programmatic web interaction.

Use when designing, reviewing, or debugging how an agent's context window gets filled, pruned, or shared — choosing what loads at boot versus on demand, sizing an install or an always-loaded file, fixing an agent that drifts, repeats itself, or forgets constraints mid-task, planning compaction or summarization, deciding single-agent versus subagents, engineering handoffs between agents, or picking a tool loadout. NOT for rewording a prompt's tone, choosing which model to pin, or debugging business logic — those are adjacent moments this skill does not serve. Historical 2024–2025 snapshot; not normative for present-day frontier models — see the Status section.

Systematically explore and test a web application to find bugs, UX issues, and other problems. Use when asked to "dogfood", "QA", "exploratory test", "find issues", "bug hunt", "test this app/site/platform", or review the quality of a web application. Produces a structured report with full reproduction evidence -- step-by-step screenshots, repro videos, and detailed repro steps for every issue -- so findings can be handed directly to the responsible teams.

Create distinctive, production-grade frontend interfaces with high design quality. Use this skill when the user asks to build web components, pages, artifacts, posters, or applications (examples include websites, landing pages, dashboards, React components, HTML/CSS layouts, or when styling/beautifying any web UI). Generates creative, polished code and UI design that avoids generic AI aesthetics.

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes

Use when implementing any feature or bugfix, before writing implementation code

Use when about to claim work is complete, fixed, or passing, or before committing or creating PRs

Use when designing, building, operating, or diagnosing an ongoing application whose live backend or control loop includes OpenRig agents, including applications with a Markdown, YAML, or JSON agent control plane or a thin surface over specialist agent roles.

Use when a bounded real-world procedure has a deterministic happy path but brownfield, variable, or partially knowable state; when an operation must resume from verified evidence; or when deciding whether agent judgment or ordinary code should own a procedure's control loop.