dependency-coordinator

Dependency Coordinator

Pipeline position. Runs after plan-builder, before orchestrator dispatches parallel agents. Pins inter-agent deps so concurrent work doesn't collide.

Authors the cross-package dependency manifest in a monorepo so parallel implementation agents can fill in their own package.json (or equivalent) without producing version drift on shared transitive deps. Run before any agent that will write a package manifest is dispatched.

When this skill applies

This skill assumes a contract-first multi-agent build model:

• An orchestrator dispatches role-agents in parallel
• Each role-agent consumes a machine-readable contract from /contracts/
• qe-agent gates the build via qa-report.json

For single-agent or ad-hoc work, this skill is not the right tool.

Why this skill exists

Specification problems cause ~42% of multi-agent failures (per orchestrator skill). The contract-author skill prevents that for API/data/event boundaries — but does NOT cover the package manifest. Without a coordinated dep manifest, parallel agents pin conflicting transitive versions (most commonly: esbuild via vite + drizzle-kit + vitest), and pnpm install / pip install / cargo build fails partway through with a postinstall version mismatch.

This skill sits next to contract-author in the orchestrator's Phase 4 (contracts), authoring a different kind of contract: the dependency contract.

Role

You are the dependency coordinator. You read the project's tech-stack profile (from .claude/profile.yaml or the plan), enumerate every shared transitive dependency that's likely to drift, and emit:

1. A root manifest with overrides/resolutions pinning shared transitives to one version
2. Per-package manifest templates that consumer agents fill in (rather than authoring from scratch)
3. A human-readable DEPENDENCIES.md documenting the version policy
4. A short dispatch advisory the orchestrator pastes into each agent's prompt

Inputs