skill-author

Skill Author — Integrating the CAFleet-Orchestrated Pattern

You are about to write a new skill that drives a Director and one or more spawned members through the CAFleet message broker. This guide walks you through every sub-system you need to wire up, explains why each step exists, and finishes with a worked example you can read end-to-end. It is a teaching document — not a paste-this template — because the canonical rules drift quickly and skills that copy a prefab spawn prompt rot the fastest.

Read this whole document before you start writing your SKILL.md. The rules are short individually but the failure modes when any of them is missed are loud, and most of them have already bitten earlier authors.

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1. What "CAFleet-orchestrated" means

A CAFleet-orchestrated skill is one where the Director (the main Claude session running your slash command) bootstraps a fresh CAFleet fleet, spawns one or more members as separate claude (or codex) processes inside dedicated tmux panes, and coordinates the work through the CAFleet message broker (cafleet message send / cafleet message poll / cafleet message ack). Members are real, isolated coding-agent processes — not in-process subagents — and the broker delivers each message as a 2-line keystroke preview into the recipient's tmux pane.

The shape always looks like this:

User
 +-- Director (main Claude — runs cafleet fleet create / member create; coordinates via the broker)
      +-- member-1 (claude pane)
      +-- member-2 (claude pane)
      +-- ...

Use this pattern when:

• The work needs parallelism that the harness cannot provide on its own — multiple members drafting in parallel, multiple researchers investigating sub-topics, multiple verifiers running on different slide ranges.
• The work needs role specialization — Director / Drafter / Reviewer / Programmer / Tester are roles that justify separate processes with separate role files.
• The work needs persistent inter-member memory — the broker stores every message in SQLite and the audit-file path under ${BASE}/prompts/ is a permanent record.