captain-ops

A session-operations playbook for a Squadrant captain, the person coordinating projects and AI agents. It covers startup checks, crew management, status updates, project-group awareness, and recording lessons learned.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it at session start to fetch verified project facts, check branch and working-tree conditions, coordinate crew members, write status, and capture learnings.
Why use it?
It provides a repeatable way to verify repository and workspace state before work begins and to keep coordination information current during the session.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the squadrant plugin — 18 skills shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tu11aa/squadrant/captain-ops
Any agent
npx skills add tu11aa/squadrant --skill captain-ops
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tu11aa/squadrant

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install squadrant, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 18 skills.

Per session 37 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 6,883 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00037 $0.06883
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.03442
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.01377
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00688

Measured 2d ago against content hash e2d8d199b0a2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

captain-ops scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugin/skills/captain-ops/SKILL.md · 492 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 492 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Captain Operations

Session Startup

Execute the 4-step startup contract defined in your system prompt.

How to execute the contract:

  1. Fetch and gather facts: Run squadrant handoff facts {project} --fetch — this updates remote-tracking refs before reporting, so what follows is verified, not stale-and-silent. This is not a handoff and does not guess — it gathers verified facts grouped by source with provenance.

  2. Check liveRepo.branchState explicitly: These are flags; act on them directly, don't just skim past them:

    • upstreamStatus: "behind" — your local branch is stale relative to origin; don't trust local-only diffs until you've reconciled.
    • upstreamStatus: "diverged" — both sides moved; this needs a decision (rebase/merge), not silence.
    • upstreamStatus: "upstream-gone" — the remote branch was deleted; this local branch is likely done.
    • upstreamStatus: "no-upstream" — never pushed.
    • dirtyWorkingTree: true — uncommitted changes are sitting from a prior session; find out why before proceeding.
    • onUnexpectedBranch: true — you're sitting on a crew/* worktree branch; a captain's own checkout normally shouldn't be.
    • mergedIntoBase: true — this branch is fully merged into base already; safe to switch back to base / clean up.
  3. Identify current state: Check tasks from the same call — liveRepo.liveCrews lists every non-terminal crew task for this project. A state: "blocked" entry with a question is waiting on you right now.

  4. Read handoff: ~/.config/squadrant/scripts/read-handoff.sh "{spokeVaultPath}" If a handoff exists, read the context carefully (currentState, openBranches, nextSteps, blockedItems, decisions). If it reported "exists": false, reconstruct from the handoff facts output instead of cold-starting blind (check checkpoint, gapSessions, claudeMem). You do the synthesizing.

  5. Additional Context (opt-in):

    • Search claude-mem (mem-search skill) for your project name.
    • Check {spokeVault}/daily-logs/ for the most recent log.
    • Check {spokeVault}/learnings/ — selectively load relevant learnings.
    • Check {spokeVault}/skills/ and {spokeVault}/wiki/.
    • Crew lifecycle events (done / blocked / idle) are delivered to your captain pane automatically by the squadrant daemon via daemon-direct cmux delivery (#332). No relay setup required.

Read the full file on GitHub · 492 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 492 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A e2d8d199b0a2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

captain-ops is a skill published in the GitHub repository tu11aa/squadrant (2 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 6,883 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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