stevennitesh Skill Router
Own one decision: select one next skill or none for an explicit route-selection request or a terminal residual packet outside its caller's scope. Never interrupt an active owner's in-scope work, replace a known contractual handoff, or start downstream execution.
Spine
- Admit. Accept only an explicit route-selection request or a caller-delegated terminal residual. Return to the caller when work remains in its scope or an owned handoff applies.
- Inspect. Use the packet and visible repository state. Inspect only facts that can change ownership.
- Exclude. Remove the current owner, Skill Router, exhausted owners, and routes whose admission predicates fail.
- Prefer. Choose the narrowest owner that can close the residual: one leaf before an orchestrator, an owned deterministic handoff before routing, and settled delivery before renewed discovery. When the chosen engineering route requires a missing or outdated setup surface, select
$repo-bootstrapinstead. - Clarify. Ask one highest-leverage question only when two routes remain materially plausible and the packet cannot decide.
- Return. Recommend exactly one skill or
none, name its precondition, and stop without executing it.
Residual Packet
A caller supplies as much as it knows:
Current owner:
Owner result: complete | blocked | rejected as out of scope
Original outcome:
Residual work:
Available evidence and source pointers:
Attempted or exhausted owners:
Rejected or excluded routes:
Known decisions and prerequisites:
Constraints and authority:
Caller return boundary:
A caller may not label expected, difficult, or merely unfinished in-scope work as residual.
Route Map
Shape
| Situation | Route |
|---|---|
| A repo-backed plan or design needs an interview and durable domain capture | $grill-with-docs |
| A plan or design needs a conversation-only interview | $grilling |
| A large, foggy effort needs a tracker-backed decision map | $wayfinder |
| One external stakeholder holds missing knowledge and needs an async discovery questionnaire | $to-questionnaire |
| One source question needs a cited repo-local note | $research |
| One design question needs runnable evidence | $prototype |
| Context must cross into a fresh session or agent thread | $handoff |
Build
| Situation | Route |
|---|---|
| Settled source needs a durable parent spec | $to-spec |
| Settled source needs dependency-ordered ready-for-agent tickets | $to-tickets |
| One bounded ready-for-agent item is selected | $implement |
| One parent spec or PRD has an associated ready ticket graph to finish | $parallel-implement |
$to-tickets output is already ready-for-agent. Route one selected item to $implement; route an explicitly requested parent-delivery run to $parallel-implement, which serializes or parallelizes each frontier until the parent graph closes.
Incoming Work And Quality
| Situation | Route |
|---|---|
| Raw issues, requests, or configured external PR/MR intake need sorting | $triage |
| A bug's expected behavior, exact symptom, cause, or trusted red-capable reproduction is uncertain | $diagnosing-bugs |
| Settled new behavior has a red-capable proof seam, or for a bug expected behavior, the exact symptom, the cause, and a trusted red-capable reproduction are known | $tdd |
| A merge, rebase, cherry-pick, or revert is conflicted, or files contain conflict markers | $resolving-merge-conflicts |
| An ordinary branch, WIP, staged, or since-X diff needs fixed-point review | $review |
| A local PR or high-risk local diff needs independent passes and a finding ledger | $convergent-pr-review |
| An immutable repository baseline needs a bounded domain robustness, correctness, methodology, model-risk, leakage, validation, analytics, or performance audit without a release decision | $audit-codebase |
| Existing behavior in one bounded region should be simplified under proof | $simplify-code |
Existing-code tie-breaker: route a caller-bounded repository correctness, domain-robustness, or performance baseline to $audit-codebase, one bounded behavior-preserving reduction to $simplify-code, one already-framed interface or seam to $codebase-design, and broad uncertainty about what to eliminate, concentrate, retain, or investigate to $improve-codebase. A selected ready item belongs to $implement, new behavior to $tdd, and an existing diff needing judgment rather than edits to $review or $convergent-pr-review.
Triage / Review: route incoming work to $triage; route an existing diff to $review or $convergent-pr-review.
Design And Pack Maintenance
| Situation | Route |
|---|---|
| Find and rank the strongest evidence-backed codebase improvements | $improve-codebase |
| Design one bounded module, interface, seam, or adapter | $codebase-design |
| Resolve domain terms, context boundaries, or ADR-worthy decisions | $domain-modeling |
| Create, edit, or review Codex skills | $writing-great-skills |
$domain-modeling and $codebase-design are shared disciplines. Route to them when language or interface shape is the work; otherwise let the owning workflow load them.
Handoff / compact: $handoff carries context to a fresh session or agent thread; /compact continues the current conversation.
Wayfinder Pre-Screen
Select $wayfinder only when one bounded destination remains foggy, at least two interdependent material decisions remain, at least one needs non-conversational work, and the set needs durable tracker-backed sequencing. Question count, size, severity, session count, or generic fog alone does not qualify.
Prefer $grill-with-docs for question- or domain-only work; $domain-modeling for settled domain persistence; the direct leaf for one evidence gap; $to-spec for settled source needing a parent artifact; $to-tickets for several settled slices; $implement for one ready slice; and none when no skill owns the residual.
A Wayfinder rejection excludes Wayfinder until material evidence changes its Admission state.
Loop Guards
- Never select Skill Router.
- Never immediately return unchanged residual work to the caller that rejected it.
- A leaf invoked by an orchestrator returns to that orchestrator; it does not route the next step.
- An open Wayfinder campaign keeps in-scope consequences inside its map.
- Grill With Docs invoked by Wayfinder returns residuals to that map.
- Repeated routing with an unchanged packet returns the same route or
none. - A recommendation never starts the selected skill.
Return
Skill: <skill-name> | none
Reason:
Precondition:
Return boundary:
Downstream execution: none
Complete when Admission holds, exclusions and the narrowest-owner preference leave one justified route or none, Return is complete, and downstream execution remains unstarted.