CLI Agent Orchestrator is a tool that coordinates multiple AI coding command-line programs by running them as separate workers in isolated terminal sessions. A supervisor uses it to delegate software tasks to specialist agents in parallel or in sequence while the workers retain their normal command-line capabilities. The catalogue skills operate this orchestration workflow.
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.
npx skills add awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator --skill cao-providergit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/awslabs/cli-agent-orchestratorWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator/cao-provider)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator/cao-provider"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator/cao-provider.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to medium
These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →
- medium Excessive Agency · line 144 Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
- medium Excessive Agency · line 144 Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00081 | $0.02077 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00041 | $0.01038 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00016 | $0.00415 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00208 |
Grade A, and why
cao-provider 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 9d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 177 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
CAO Provider Creator
Guide for creating a new CLI agent provider for CLI Agent Orchestrator. A "provider" is an adapter that lets CAO interact with a specific CLI-based AI agent through tmux.
What You're Building
A provider translates between CAO's unified interface and a specific CLI tool's terminal output. It needs to:
- Launch the CLI tool in a tmux window with the right flags
- Detect status by parsing terminal output (IDLE, PROCESSING, COMPLETED, ERROR, WAITING_USER_ANSWER)
- Extract responses from the terminal buffer after the agent finishes
- Clean up when the terminal is deleted
Before You Start
Gather this information about the target CLI:
- What command launches it? (e.g.,
claude,kiro-cli chat,codex) - What does the idle prompt look like? (e.g.,
>,❯,ask a question) - What does the processing state look like? (e.g., spinner characters, "Thinking...")
- How are responses formatted? (e.g., preceded by
⏺, inside a box, plain text) - Does it support
--dangerously-skip-permissionsor similar flags? - Does it have a REPL mode or is it single-shot?
- How does it handle MCP servers? (CLI flags, config file, agent JSON)
- Does it use alt-screen (full-screen TUI) or scrollback (inline output)? This fundamentally changes status detection logic — see lesson #16
- What's the exit command? (
/exit,/quit, Ctrl+C)
Step-by-Step Implementation
Step 1: Add to ProviderType enum
File: src/cli_agent_orchestrator/models/provider.py
class ProviderType(str, Enum):
# ... existing providers ...
NEW_CLI = "new_cli"
The value string is used everywhere — in API requests, database, config. Use snake_case.
Step 2: Create the provider class
File: src/cli_agent_orchestrator/providers/new_cli.py
Read references/provider-template.md for the full annotated template. The key sections:
Regex patterns — Define at module level, not inside methods. You need patterns for:
- ANSI code stripping (reuse
r"\x1b\[[0-9;]*m") - Idle prompt detection (what the prompt looks like when waiting for input)
- Processing detection (spinners, "Thinking...", progress indicators)
- Response markers (how agent responses start — e.g.,
⏺for Claude Code) - Permission/confirmation prompts (if the CLI asks Y/n questions)
What ships with it
3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
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.
- 9d ago First seen · 177 lines · 81 tokens per session scan A bc45362aa687
cao-provider is a skill published in the GitHub repository awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator (1,235 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 81 tokens to every session and 2,077 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.
Other skills, from other repositories
system-architecture
Design systems with appropriate complexity - no more, no less. Use when the user asks to architect applications, design system boundaries, plan service decomposition, evaluate monolith vs microservices, make scaling decisions, or review structural trade-offs. Applies to new system design, refactoring, and migration…
tool-selection
Internal guidance for choosing between agent-rack's sync and background execution tools, and when to use per-agent shortcuts. Use whenever delegating a task to a claude/codex/opencode/Antigravity/custom sub-agent through agent-rack.
review
Run a structured, read-only code review through agent-rack's agentreview tool.
session-send
Send follow-up input to a running background agent-rack session.
review-handling
Internal guidance for presenting agent-rack's agentreview output back to the user. Use whenever an agentreview call (foreground or via agentsessionstatus) returns a result.
run
Run a one-shot task synchronously with a named CLI sub-agent via agent-rack.