Compass, Relay, and Cairn

Three lean, harness-agnostic skills plus two CLIs. The skills are short guides that state intent; the tooling carries the mechanics (interfaces over instructions).

• compass settles a direction interactively — disposable visuals and prototypes, one decision-driving question at a time — and records the outcome on the external decision shelf.
• relay takes a bounded brief (one task or independent parallel lanes), does the work with the harness's native isolation, and returns one compact receipt.
• cairn preserves and resumes working context in homes that already own it (issue, PR, shelf, memory) instead of scattering plan and handoff files through the repository.
• decision-shelf is the CLI interface to the shelf: durable, agent-agnostic HTML decision records kept outside every repository. Its help text is the manual the skills defer to. decision-shelf bridge turns a record's acceptance criteria into a failing test scaffold, so implementation binds to an executable spec instead of prose.
• delivery carries relay's delivery mechanics: delivery checks discovers and runs a repository's documented checks, and delivery receipt drafts a receipt bound to the exact head. Branching and worktree isolation stay with git and the harness.

Install

npx @dylanmccavitt/skills@latest

The installer is cross-harness: one marker-backed bundle lives under ~/.agents/orchestration-skills (the canonical skills home), and package-managed skill links are created in ~/.agents/skills, $CODEX_HOME/skills, and ~/.claude/skills (override with --agents-home, --codex-home, --claude-home, or the AGENTS_HOME, CODEX_HOME, CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR environment variables). A marker-backed bundle from an earlier Codex-only install is migrated automatically.

Upgrading removes only package-owned legacy skill links (including the retired v2 skills teamwork, governed-delivery, prototype, decision-lab, and deviling) and exact package-owned hook entries. Unrelated skills and ambiguous or unmanaged state are preserved or rejected rather than overwritten.

Inspect or remove an installation:

npx @dylanmccavitt/skills@latest doctor
npx @dylanmccavitt/skills@latest uninstall

doctor also audits the installed skill inventory across every harness and flags oversized guides (400+ words) as advisories — lean skills defer mechanics to tools and references.

Decision shelf

npm install --global @dylanmccavitt/skills
decision-shelf help

Records live under $DECISION_SHELF_HOME, $XDG_DATA_HOME/decision-shelf, or ~/.local/share/decision-shelf, grouped per project by Git remote.

Development

npm test

Runs the skill validator (frontmatter, references, agent metadata) and the node test suite, which also enforces that skills stay lean guides: under 400 words and at most three prohibitions per SKILL.md.

v3 migration

Version 3 is a breaking simplification: fewer, shorter skills that trust model judgment, with mechanics moved into tool interfaces. The five v2 skills collapse into three: decision-lab + deviling + prototype become compass, teamwork + governed-delivery become relay, and the handoff guidance becomes cairn. Decision records are unchanged HTML files managed through the decision-shelf CLI. The v2 trajectory-evaluation harness (skills-eval, replay cases, and dashboard) was removed with it.