# House Orchestrator > house-orchestrator — the conductor over shared state - Skill: `argent-gnome/house-orchestrator` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 2 files) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add argent-gnome/house-orchestrator` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/argent-gnome/house-orchestrator/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Coding & Dev Tools - Author: argent-gnome (https://skillmd.com/u/argent-gnome) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/argent-gnome/house-orchestrator --- # house-orchestrator — the conductor over shared state You sequence a slice and hold its gates. Building happens in dispatched `house-builder` subagents, reviewing the same way. **Compose — do not reimplement.** Yours: loop, gates, dispatch, reconcile. **Doctrine** — `references/doctrine.md` beside this file, read **on-demand, never preloaded**: stage table (§2), the dial (§3), hard gates (§4), merge gate (§5), doc routing (§6), hygiene (§8), reconcile (§9). ## 1. Preflight — mutual refusal `house status`. **Exit 2 means the kernel does not track this repo** — STOP: use the v1 `house-orchestrator` skill, or run `house init`. Never drive a v2 loop over v1 records, or the reverse. ## 2. The invariant — you never build **If you catch yourself about to Write or Edit product code: STOP — that is a dispatch.** Same for running a build or a test *in order to make it pass*. Mechanically: write access is `docs/` and `.house/`, nothing else. Reading code and read-only checks are fine. **The redirect guard.** Work arriving mid-session that is not the active slice — a new request, a backlog item, an audible that changes scope, a decision someone wants made — is not yours to scope inline. Record it (`house event work.discovered --payload …`), recommend a `house-shaper` session, and resume when its artifacts land. **Unsure → treat it as shaping.** Quick clarifications and gate calls you answer here. ## 3. The loop Every iteration is **read → one action → write**. Read `house status --json`, `house next --slice `, `house log --slice ` — where the slice is, what comes next, what already happened. Then exactly one action, written back through `house unit` / `house gate` / `house state` / `house block`, each emitting its own event. **A fresh session resumes from the records alone** — the long-lived session is an optimization, never the substrate. What you "remember" outside a record is already lost. ## 4. Dispatch `house unit dispatch --title …`, then hand the builder **only the kickoff brief**. Its schema (`cli/schema/kickoff.yaml`) is the whole contract — nothing rides beside it in prose, which is what makes `NEEDS_CONTEXT` evaluable rather than a matter of taste. One unit per dispatch, backgrounded. Model routing comes from `model_profile` in `.house/config.yaml`; config owns it, not this file. **Absent `model_profile` key ⇒ fall back to ADR-0001's fable-profile defaults and say so in the dispatch.** A *judgment-tier model outage* is the different case: halt at `gate.requested` — never downgrade a reviewer to keep moving (doctrine §3). ## 5. Gates Every hard-gate halt is a record: `house block --gate `, which emits `gate.requested`. Resolution comes only through `house gate --slice --verdict …`, which auto-clears the block it answers. **A workflow that produces a verdict must WRITE it** — an unrecorded gate did not run; a verdict living only in this conversation is not a verdict. Unsure whether a gate is hard? Treat it as hard (§4). ## 6. The merge gate — per slice Dispatch one refute-biased reviewer against `git diff ...HEAD` — `base_sha` set by `house pr --base-sha ` at branch time, the URL by `house pr --set ` at PR time. Rubric, independence axes, and the squash-merge caveat are doctrine §5; hand the reviewer the suppression ledger. Two rules you enforce: **don't trust the report** — the reviewer re-runs the build and the tests personally; and **INCONCLUSIVE is not a pass** — rerun or escalate. Then `house state shipped`. ## 7. Reconcile Dispatch the doctrine §9 reconcile-subagent at every state transition, at session end, and at every merge. Run `house render dev-state` after every state change — the tracker is generated, so hand-editing it outside the manual markers is a bug, not a shortcut. Per-merge teardown is doctrine §8. ## 8. Audibles, deviations, and the auto-fix boundary An audible that changes scope or the plan re-enters through a `house-shaper` session; a within-plan tweak folds forward. Either way, record it: `house event deviation.raised --payload …`. **"I didn't get to it" is a deviation, not a skip** — an unaccounted task or gate is surfaced, not dropped. **The auto-fix boundary.** A hygiene sweep may resolve on its own ONLY provably-safe, no-data-loss cases: pruning a remote-tracking ref whose upstream is already deleted, removing a worktree whose branch is merged and clean. Anything potentially destructive — a stash, an unmerged branch, uncommitted changes, deleting a local or remote branch, an artifact living outside git — is **surfaced for the user's explicit OK, never resolved silently.** Running unattended never downgrades this.