agent-skills: Instructions file for Codex

Agent Skills for Tower

This repository is a catalog of agent skills for Tower, installable with the skills CLI (npx skills add tower/agent-skills). There is no application code here — the deliverables are the SKILL.md files themselves.

Repository layout

• skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md — one directory per skill. The skills CLI discovers skills at exactly this depth.
• A skill directory may also contain supporting files (scripts, references) that the SKILL.md links to with relative paths.

Skill conventions

• Frontmatter requires name (lowercase, hyphen-separated, must match the directory name and be unique across the repo) and description.
• The description is what an agent uses to decide when to load the skill: state what the skill does AND the trigger phrases/situations that should invoke it, including cases where the user doesn't use Tower terminology.
• Skill names are prefixed tower- (e.g. tower-integration, tower-data).
• Write instructions imperatively, addressed to the agent. Prefer concrete commands and code snippets over prose. Include a troubleshooting section and a "what this skill is not for" section that points to sibling skills.
• Secrets handling is a hard rule in every skill: credential values never appear in code, config files, or conversation — they live in Tower secrets.

Design principles for data skills

Every skill in this catalog gives an agent access to customer data. New skills must uphold these principles; they exist so a skill author doesn't accidentally relax a guarantee a sibling skill depends on.

1. Read and write are separate skills with separate credential models. tower-data vends short-lived read-only credentials; tower-integration owns writes via scoped secrets. Never give an analytical skill write credentials or a write skill blanket admin credentials. A new skill must pick a side (or justify why it needs both, with explicit user confirmation before any write).
2. Secrets never transit the conversation. Skills instruct the user to create secrets themselves, verify by preview only, and never echo tokens — including into temp files that outlive the command. If a user pastes a credential, store it immediately, never repeat it, and advise rotation.
3. Credentials resolve before code is written. A skill must not have the agent write code that needs a credential that doesn't exist yet — that's how insecure workarounds (.env files, hardcoded fallbacks) get improvised.
4. Writes are idempotent and stateless. Safe to re-run (upsert/merge or explicit dedup); incremental cursors derived from the destination, never from local state — runners are ephemeral.
5. Verify by reading the destination back. Logs and exit codes are not proof that data landed or that an answer is right. Skills must end with a verification step against the actual data, and show the user auditable evidence (row counts, sample rows, the SQL that was run).
6. Discover, don't assume. List existing catalogs, tables, secrets, and apps before creating or querying anything; ask when ambiguous rather than guessing.
7. Query results are the user's private data. Use them to answer the question; don't republish them to external services.
8. Fail with a diagnosis, not a rewrite. Distinguish user-code failure, infrastructure failure, expired credentials (self-heal by re-vending), and cold-start — each has a different fix. Every skill carries a Troubleshooting table for this.
9. Declare non-goals. Every skill ends with a "What this skill is not for" section handing off to the sibling skill that owns the adjacent job — this is what keeps principle 1's boundary real.