delegating-to-otto

delegating-to-otto is a skill for Claude Code from astronomer/agents. It costs 208 tokens per session (3,760 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A guide for asking Astronomer's Otto agent to carry out Airflow, dbt, and data-engineering work as a delegated sub-agent. Otto is a data-engineering assistant available through the Astro CLI.

In plain words
What is it for?
Delegate Airflow upgrades, migrations, compatibility questions, live workflow investigations, dbt work, and other data-engineering tasks when the user explicitly requests Otto.
Why use it?
It helps decide when delegation is useful and shows how to pass work to Otto without accidentally creating a recursive delegation loop.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the astronomer-data plugin — 35 skills, 3 commands shipped together

Good fit Delegate Airflow upgrades, migrations, compatibility questions, live workflow investigations, dbt work, and other data-engineering tasks when the user explicitly requests Otto.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/astronomer/agents/delegating-to-otto
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add astronomer/agents --skill delegating-to-otto
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/astronomer/agents

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install astronomer-data, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 35 skills, 3 commands.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for delegating-to-otto

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/astronomer/agents/delegating-to-otto/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/astronomer/agents/delegating-to-otto)
Your own site
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Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for delegating-to-otto

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/astronomer/agents/delegating-to-otto"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/astronomer/agents/delegating-to-otto.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 208 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,760 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00208 $0.03760
Opus 5 $0.00104 $0.01880
Sonnet 5 $0.00042 $0.00752
Haiku 4.5 $0.00021 $0.00376

Measured 10d ago against content hash 06a64fc0eaec, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

delegating-to-otto scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 10d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/delegating-to-otto/SKILL.md · 274 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 274 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Delegating to Otto

Otto is Astronomer's data-engineering agent, bundled with the Astro CLI as astro otto. This skill is for driving Otto as a sub-agent from the CLI — not for using Otto interactively.

If you are Otto, stop here. Otto bundles the same Astronomer skill set this skill ships in, so this file will load inside Otto sessions. Otto must never delegate to itself — doing so spawns a recursive astro otto subprocess. Ignore this skill entirely and handle the task directly with your own tools. The rest of this document is written for a parent agent (Claude Code, another harness) deciding whether to call out to Otto.

When delegating pays off

Signals that favor delegating:

  • Airflow upgrades, migrations, runtime/provider compat questions. Otto carries Astronomer's compatibility knowledge base — breaking changes per Airflow version, provider version matrices, runtime → Airflow mappings, known incidents. Generic agents don't have this and will often fabricate plausible-sounding answers.
  • Live-Airflow investigation. Production failure diagnosis, run-history analysis, log triage. Otto's af tooling against a connected Airflow is wired up and bundled with debugging skills; replicating it ad-hoc in the parent session is wasteful.
  • Long, self-contained subtasks. Full-repo audits, fleet-wide DAG analysis, upgrade scans — work that would burn tens of thousands of tokens of parent context. Delegating keeps the parent thread cheap and the result is one summary back, not a turn-by-turn trace.
  • Parallel branches. Use --fork to explore an alternative ("what if we used Cosmos here?") without polluting the main thread.
  • Tasks that lean on team memory. Otto reads .astro/memory/ (committed) and ~/.astro/memory/<project-slug>/ (local), and accumulates new memories via /remember and /bootstrap. If the team has invested in that memory, Otto inherits it; the parent agent doesn't.

Read the full file on GitHub · 274 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 10d ago First seen · 274 lines · 208 tokens per session scan A 06a64fc0eaec

Subscribe to this mod's changes

delegating-to-otto is a skill published in the GitHub repository astronomer/agents (439 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 208 tokens to every session and 3,760 once invoked, about $0.0010 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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