Bundled skills

Clankie ships reusable guidance for leading, reviewing, tracking and shipping work alongside his product and tool skills. Skills are available context, not mandatory rituals: the task, repository and user's authorization still govern their use.

What ships

Every skill authored in .agents/skills ships with every install and is always on. There is one class and no selection setting: clankie skills (and /skills in the console) lists the catalog, and clankie doctor includes it. Checkout-only skills live in .agents/dev-skills and do not ship.

The catalog holds 18 skills: leadership and process skills (lead, shared-checkout, tidy, work-items, work-orient) beside product and tool skills (clankie, this-machine, trace-clankie, views, research-team, browser-use, connected-accounts, desktop-control, herdr, fleet-resources, pokeagents, minecraft, lead-skin-tools). Each teaches Clankie, his seat or his workers how to use his own body and tools (ADR 0236). The directory listing is the authoritative inventory.

The lead and work-items skills read the current effective fleet.closure and fleet.machineSetup, including project overrides. Defaults delegate closure and already-linked machine setup to the lead, while genuine owner-only actions retain their boundary. See fleet responsibility.

Older settings files may still carry a skills section (opinionated, exclude). It is retired: the loader drops it, and every shipped skill loads.

The merged leadership names swarm-lead and herdr-lead are filtered from Clankie's Pi roots and Codex worker overlays, so an older workspace or global copy cannot restore them through those loaders. Owner-global files are untouched.

clankie-mode and clankie-perf live in the owner's skills repository and reach Clankie through ~/.agents/skills; the repo carries no links outside itself, which clankie update refuses to stage.

How harnesses receive them

• Clankie's Pi sessions, composer and TUI use clankieSkillRoots. Shipped skills win over same-named owner skills; native automatic Pi discovery is disabled in favor of these explicit roots.
• A Pi turn lists only the bundled, checkout and workspace skills. Skills from ~/.agents/skills and Pi's agent directory stay loaded but unlisted: the owner's /name still expands them and skill_search finds them by task.
• The Claude operator seat projects the bundled plugin into a fresh private skill-projections/launch-* directory under Clankie's state home, linking the output style, hooks, MCP configuration and the shipped skills. A skill the owner already installs in the Claude profile's own skills/ is left out so each name is listed once. The seat disables an older installed clankie@clankie for that session and enables clankie@inline.
• Local Claude hires load the skills-only integrations/worker-skills plugin; it carries neither Clankie's identity nor operator hooks.
• The standalone clankie-worker plugin, for hand-started, remote and PC seats, carries snapshots of clankie, fleet-resources, work-items and work-orient (WORKER_SKILLS in integrations/claude-plugin/worker/bin/skill-bundle.mjs), so a seat without the catalog still has the fleet, tracker and orientation guidance.
• Local Pi hires receive --no-skills plus explicit --skill paths, including the supported owner and workspace roots.
• Local Codex hires receive a private CODEX_HOME under the body's state directory and keep --no-daemon. The overlay copies configuration and hooks, preserves existing trust hashes for the identical hook file, and links authentication, plugin and transcript state. Shipped names win over owner Codex skills. No global configuration or skill links are rewritten.
• Grok and OpenCode seats receive the shipped skill paths through their native per-launch configuration.

Claude and Codex can independently load skills through global plugins, project directories or other roots outside these projections; owner-global selection remains untouched.

Release assembly dereferences the catalog into the product root, both Claude projections and the Codex plugin snapshot, independent of build-machine settings, so an installed body needs no sibling checkout.

Herdr skill

Herdr is both a bundled tool skill and an independently selectable global skill. Fresh installs and hosted bodies need its instructions without any owner-global skills. The shipped herdr skill is a short loader: it tells the reader to run herdr --skill and follow that output, so the instructions always match the runtime in use, including one updated beyond the packaged pin. Release assembly installs the checksum-verified pin from scripts/release/herdr.json, checks that it serves --skill, and checks that .agents/skills and both Claude plugin projections carry the same loader; the hosted image repeats those checks as its unprivileged runtime user.

In a source checkout, pnpm herdr:skill:check runs the same checks against the cached binary under .data/herdr/bin (a fresh checkout downloads it from the official release) and runs as part of pnpm check.

The owned tidy and lead sources teach safe owner-checkout sync, fetched-main hire admission and exact-worktree pruning. Update these sources directly; no personal skills export or vendor manifest is part of this catalog.

Quick-action declarations

A skill can expose a normal Clankie turn through this optional frontmatter:

quick-action:
  name: Tidy up
  icon: broom
  selectionArg: selection

Clients request includeQuickActions on composer_catalog to receive these declarations. Closed-pane roster history is available with includeClosedPanes on fleet; omitted flags retain older strict response shapes.

The catalog validates a nonempty display name, a lowercase icon identifier, and an optional argument name. An invalid declaration omits the action without hiding the skill. The surface uses the existing skill invocation and can pass selection context under the declared argument. Clankie judges and acts through his ordinary tools; the turn stays visible and interruptible.

tidy is the first such skill. /tidy or /tidy selection=w1:p1 starts that skill through the console's normal conversation path. It tells Clankie to inspect and harvest before closing, give a one-line reason, and say what he closed. Saved reports and last output remain in roster history; Undo reopens and resumes within five minutes. See ADR 0228 for native input evidence, refusal reasons and the remaining read/close race.

History

• 2026-09-28, whole-skill cuts. linear-write (personal voice), update-review-ethos (a team decision), mr-link (GitLab-specific, overlapped p), linear-agent-session (excessive handoff ceremony), repo-evolution-review (niche) and work-tracking (its policy moved into work-items).

• 2026-09-30, leadership merge. VUH-1457 merged the three leadership entries into lead; the vendored dashboard plugin and board-specific references were removed per cut audit C23.

• 2026-10-02, unbundled for near-zero use. blast-radius, co-w, conventions, docs-review, herdr-handoff, interrogate, linear-grind, linear-plan, perf-review, pr-description, robust-review and testing-archive left the bundle: over 21 days each was loaded about as often as it merely appeared in a listing (cut audit C22). Owner-global selections were unchanged. The upstream herdr-handoff skill was deleted on 2026-10-04: its kickoff typed into the receiver's TUI, which ADR 0207 rules out.

• 2026-10-06, one class. The process skills previously vendored from Volpestyle/skills became repo-owned skills in .agents/skills; the skills.opinionated/skills.exclude settings, the clankie skills selection subcommands and hire_agent's skills override were removed.

• 2026-10-06, usage cut (21-day usage audit; ADR 0236). Unbundled; the owner keeps global copies, and the retired-name filter does not cover these names, so those copies stay loadable:

  • reflect: 54 load sessions, only 1 from the bundled copy.
  • c: 51 worker sessions, 1 from Clankie, 1 owner-typed /c.
  • p: 34 worker sessions, none from Clankie.
  • solution-space: 38 worker sessions, 1 from Clankie.
  • trip-planning, comparison-shopping, daily-digest, inbox-triage: at most one load each in nine days; the owner dropped the errand set. Their Clankie-specific mail and Google guidance moved to the new connected-accounts skill, with the consent reference from this-machine.

  Folded: computer-use-delegation (3 loads in 383 listings, none from Clankie) into desktop-control's delegation reference. browser-use was folded the same day and restored: its browser is Clankie's own body, and few loads reflect how rarely he browses, not a skill he doesn't need.