ai-conductor: Skill for Claude Code

Event Spine

Extend the existing event spine; never add a parallel channel.

This repository has exactly one telemetry spine. Every mechanism that observes, reports, or coordinates work is expected to ride it. A design that invents a second channel for a concern the spine already carries is a defect at design time, not a style preference — and it is the specific mistake this skill exists to catch, because it is invisible in review and expensive to unwind.

Run this before the design is written down, not after. The cost of the check is one question; the cost of missing it is a permanent second source of truth.

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1. The spine

ConductorEventEmitter
  → the ConductorEvent union (src/conductor/src/types/events.ts)
    → EventPersister (src/conductor/src/engine/event-persister.ts)
      → .pipeline/events.jsonl

Consumers subscribe to the emitter or read the ledger: the daemon and its CLI, the UI renderer and subscriber, the OTel visualizer, and the event sinks. Do not hard-code that list into a design document — grep for it when you need it. The point is not who reads today, it is that everything that reads, reads here. A channel outside this path is seen by none of them.

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2. Decision procedure

Answer in order. The first YES that survives step 3 settles it.

Step 1 — Is the thing you are adding a channel?

You are adding a channel if the design introduces any of these:

• a watcher or poller that observes state to infer that something happened
• a sidecar file, a bespoke log, or a second ledger with its own format
• a timestamp, counter, or status stamped into an artifact so a later reader can reconstruct timing
• an IPC path, a status endpoint, or any out-of-band signal between components

If none of those, this skill does not apply. Stop.

Step 2 — Does the bus already carry this concern?

Ask it literally: is this an occurrence in time that some component needs to know about? If yes, the bus carries it, whether or not a variant for it exists today. A missing variant is not evidence that the bus is the wrong mechanism — it is the work.