orchestration

Orca Orchestration

This file is a discovery stub, not the usage guide. The full, version-matched Orca orchestration reference is served by the orca binary itself — kept out of this file on purpose so it can never drift from the binary that will actually run your commands.

Engage Orca orchestration whenever you need structured multi-agent coordination: threaded messages, blocking ask/reply flows, task dispatch, worker_done/escalation waits, task DAGs, decision gates, coordinator loops, or decomposing work across agents. Use the orca-cli skill instead for full ownership handoffs ("hand off", "handoff", "handover", "give this to another agent", "another worktree") when the user did not ask to supervise, monitor, wait for results, or coordinate a DAG — and for ordinary terminal control, shell commands, worktree management, and the built-in browser. Coordination requires real Orca runtime state; never substitute a non-Orca subagent tool.

Resolve the CLI for this session

Choose the executable once and reuse it for every later command:

• If the ORCA_CLI_COMMAND environment variable is set, use its value. Orca exports this for managed WSL sessions.
• Otherwise, in a dev checkout whose session exposes ORCA_DEV_REPO_ROOT, use orca-dev.
• Otherwise, on Linux outside an Orca-managed terminal, use orca-ide. Never run bare orca there — outside Orca's terminals it normally resolves to the GNOME Orca screen reader (/usr/bin/orca) and starts speech on the user's machine.
• Otherwise, use orca.

Below, ORCA is a placeholder for the executable you resolved. Substitute it before running anything; do not create a shell variable or run ORCA literally. This works the same way in POSIX shells, PowerShell, and cmd.exe.

If the selected executable cannot run, report its exact error and stop. Do not fall through to another executable, which could silently target a different Orca build.

Load the full guide before running Orca commands

ORCA skills get orchestration