cao-session-management

cao-session-management is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator. It costs 49 tokens per session (1,924 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A guide for controlling CAO, a command-line tool that coordinates multiple AI-agent terminals. It covers launching named sessions, checking their status, sending instructions, resolving stuck terminals, and shutting sessions down.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to start or inspect multi-agent sessions, communicate with workers, install or discover agent profiles, unblock terminals, and stop sessions.
Why use it?
It provides the commands and checks needed to manage several agents working together. It also helps identify missing profiles or a CAO server that is not running.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex ✓ vendor

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions Codex.

Good fit Use it to start or inspect multi-agent sessions, communicate with workers, install or discover agent profiles, unblock terminals, and stop sessions.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator/cao-session-management
About the project

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.

awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator · 1,235 stars · on GitHub · awslabs.github.io

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 awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator --skill cao-session-management
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 cao-session-management

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator/cao-session-management.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator/cao-session-management)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator/cao-session-management"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator/cao-session-management.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 49 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,924 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 7 findings, up to high

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 →

  • high Data Exfiltration · line 112
    Code or instructions that leak agent conversation context to external services, potentially exposing sensitive user interactions.
    Fix: Remove any code that sends prompts, responses, or session data externally. Preserve user privacy; never exfiltrate conversation content.
  • high Data Exfiltration · line 113
    Code or instructions that leak agent conversation context to external services, potentially exposing sensitive user interactions.
    Fix: Remove any code that sends prompts, responses, or session data externally. Preserve user privacy; never exfiltrate conversation content.
  • high Data Exfiltration · line 114
    Code or instructions that leak agent conversation context to external services, potentially exposing sensitive user interactions.
    Fix: Remove any code that sends prompts, responses, or session data externally. Preserve user privacy; never exfiltrate conversation content.
  • high Data Exfiltration · line 115
    Code or instructions that leak agent conversation context to external services, potentially exposing sensitive user interactions.
    Fix: Remove any code that sends prompts, responses, or session data externally. Preserve user privacy; never exfiltrate conversation content.
  • high Data Exfiltration · line 131
    Code or instructions that leak agent conversation context to external services, potentially exposing sensitive user interactions.
    Fix: Remove any code that sends prompts, responses, or session data externally. Preserve user privacy; never exfiltrate conversation content.
  • high Data Exfiltration · line 151
    Code or instructions that leak agent conversation context to external services, potentially exposing sensitive user interactions.
    Fix: Remove any code that sends prompts, responses, or session data externally. Preserve user privacy; never exfiltrate conversation content.
  • high Data Exfiltration · line 165
    Code or instructions that leak agent conversation context to external services, potentially exposing sensitive user interactions.
    Fix: Remove any code that sends prompts, responses, or session data externally. Preserve user privacy; never exfiltrate conversation content.
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 $0.00049 $0.01924
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00962
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00385
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00192

Measured 8d ago against content hash 9812c0c8e23f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cao-session-management scanned grade A with 1 finding 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 8d 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl -sf http://localhost:9889/sessions >/dev/null && echo OK || echo "start cao-server"
skills/cao-session-management/SKILL.md · 168 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 168 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

CAO Session Management

Overview

CAO runs multi-agent workflows in named sessions. A conductor agent inside each session orchestrates the work.

Core Concepts

  • Session: A group of agent terminals working together
  • Conductor: The supervisor terminal — receives instructions, delegates to workers
  • Provider: LLM backend. Default kiro_cli, override with --provider

Prerequisites

Before launching a session, verify:

  • cao-server is running at localhost:9889. Quick check:
    curl -sf http://localhost:9889/sessions >/dev/null && echo OK || echo "start cao-server"
    
    If not running, start it in a separate terminal: cao-server.
  • The agent profile is installed. cao launch --agents <profile> fails if the profile is unknown. Install built-ins or custom files with cao install <profile|path|url>.

Discovering Available Profiles

Profiles are CAO-level entities, installed with cao install regardless of which CLI provider runs them. To find available profiles:

Source Command
All available profiles across built-in store + local store + provider directories curl -sf http://localhost:9889/agents/profiles — canonical, provider-agnostic
Custom/local profile files only ls ~/.aws/cli-agent-orchestrator/agent-store/
Built-in profiles installed via cao install <name> ls ~/.aws/cli-agent-orchestrator/agent-context/
Profile installation and keyword discovery see Agent profile installation and profile discovery
Provider-native list (kiro_cli only) kiro-cli agent list — useful because CAO mirrors profiles into ~/.kiro/agents/

The HTTP endpoint is the recommended check: it scans the built-in packaged store, the local store (agent-store/), and provider-specific directories (including agent-context/), then returns a deduplicated list (by profile name, built-in wins) with a source label on each entry.

Read the full file on GitHub · 168 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. 8d ago First seen · 168 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A 9812c0c8e23f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cao-session-management is a skill published in the GitHub repository awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator (1,235 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 1,924 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.