rove: Skill for Claude Code

Arena

Fan out N parallel attempts at the same task. Read every candidate end to end. Pick the strongest as the base. Graft the best ideas from the others into it. Verify the synthesized result.

Start

Open a todolist with one entry per phase before launching anything. The arena runs autonomously and the list keeps phases from silently disappearing.

1. Frame
2. Fan out
3. Cross-judge
4. Pick
5. Graft
6. Verify

Phase A: Frame

The N candidates will receive the same prompt, so the prompt is the contract. Get it right before spawning anything.

1. State the artifact each candidate is producing.
2. Derive the rubric. State what success looks like for this task, then turn it into 3-6 concrete gradeable criteria. Concrete: Adds a --dry-run flag that skips writes. Vague: code is correct. The rubric is the picker's tool in Phase D; candidates only see the task.
3. Pick the runners. Spawn one per design direction, varying model across them where the Agent tool allows it. Spawn more when the arena covers multiple design directions. Same model N times when the work is generation-bound rather than judgment-sensitive.
4. Assign output paths. Each candidate writes to its own location (a git worktree where possible, otherwise /tmp/arena-<slug>/candidate-<n>/). N candidates writing to the same path is shared mutable state and fails the the separate-before-serializing-shared-state principle skill test.

Phase B: Fan out

Spawn all N subagents in one message with run_in_background: true, each with the task, the path to the shared grounding, its own output path, and instructions to produce both the artifact and a short rationale.

The rationale is mandatory. Without it, the parent cannot tell whether a candidate's structure is principled or accidental, which makes Phase E grafting unreliable. Each rationale names the alternatives the candidate considered and what it rejected.

If a candidate fails to produce output, proceed with N-1 and note the dropout in the synthesis record.