dispatches

dispatches is a shareable agent skill for repositories that want a human-readable record of why a branch changed.

Agents need memory. Models need transcripts. Humans need orientation.

When a coding agent works for hours or days, the diff tells you what changed and the transcript tells you everything that happened, but neither is a good way to understand the branch. Dispatches fill that gap: a chronological, branch-scoped set of short notes in .agents/dispatches/<date>-<branch>.md that explain what the session was trying to do, what changed since the last meaningful entry, and how to interpret the work.

Dispatches are written for humans first. They can still help future agents, but that is not the primary job. They are not raw chat history, and they are not a general-purpose memory bank. They are a curated captain's log for a branch.

Why this exists

This project started as a "journal" or ".diary" workflow because agent-heavy development creates a specific kind of confusion:

• commit history captures code movement, not the evolving interpretation of that movement
• transcript archives are too exhaustive when a reviewer just needs the shape of the work
• plans go stale quickly unless they are folded back into the running record
• repo-level movement on main or a base branch can change how a feature branch should be read, even if nothing happened locally that day
• long-running threads blur together unless each meaningful day gets its own entry

Dispatches exist to preserve that missing middle: not every keystroke, and not just the final diff, but the editorial context a human reviewer or future maintainer actually needs.

What the skill enforces

• one dispatch file per date and branch
• an ## Editor's Note at the top that summarizes intent and shifts in context
• updates as commits happen during the session so the note stays aligned with the branch
• migration of standalone plan documents into the relevant dated dispatch entry, followed by removal of the original files
• a chronological history that explains why work happened, not just what changed

Packaging

The repository is structured as a root-level skill so current skills tooling can discover it directly:

npx skills add <owner>/dispatches

It is also publishable to npm as dispatches. The package includes a small helper CLI:

dispatches verify
dispatches path
dispatches export ./some-directory

On this machine, npm cache permissions required using a temporary cache during verification and publish:

npm_config_cache=/tmp/npm-cache npm publish --access public