Skills

Skills are the user-facing Orcaops workflows installed into your coding agent. Describe the outcome you want in normal language; the matching skill chooses the CLI commands, validates their responses, and handles the next step.

Some skills are lifecycle machinery the agent normally selects on its own. Others represent capabilities you deliberately ask for, such as explaining a line or producing a changelog. Skill names use the default orcaops- prefix; your installation may use a custom prefix.

The automatic work lifecycle

For a normal non-trivial development task, injected session guidance and repository instructions tell the agent to run this lifecycle. Give the agent the development task normally; do not prompt for each row.

When the agent uses it	Skill	Result
Before implementation or a plan revision	orcaops-capture	Records or revises the task plan.
Around each coherent unit of work	orcaops-checkpoint	Attributes changes and records decisions, evidence, and uncertainty.
When the task is complete	orcaops-finish	Reviews the work, records the outcome, and renders the digest.

If one of these phases is missed or needs to be rerun, name the skill explicitly as described under If a skill does not trigger.

Continue or inspect work

These are deliberate requests rather than phases you add to every task. Examples are intents, not exact trigger phrases.

Ask your agent	Skill	Result
Pick up where we left off.	orcaops-resume	Restores the active artifact and explains the next work.
Show me what changed. Draft the PR description.	orcaops-digest	Renders the existing captured work for review or sharing.

Review the work

Ask your agent	Skill	Result
Generate a Task Review for this branch.	orcaops-task-review	Builds the branch-level review for orcaops watch when you decide the combined work is ready.
Address the open Task Review comments.	orcaops-task-review	Reads locally anchored feedback, works requested changes, and replies in each comment thread.
Is this actually done? Red-team this work.	orcaops-adversarial-review	Challenges completion claims, uncertainty, plan lineage, and unaccounted changes.

Task Review organizes evidence for a human reviewer. Adversarial review tries to refute the agent's claims. Neither is a merge verdict. Request Task Review again to refresh it after material branch changes.

Report progress and releases

The orcaops-recap skill turns captured work into standup, changelog, and journal formats. Ask for the report you need; the agent selects the right time window or git range.

What you need	Example request	Result
Daily or weekly standup	Give me my standup for yesterday.	Summarizes shipped work, work in flight, and loose ends over the activity window.
Client or team update	Put together a client update for this week.	Produces a concise progress report from captured outcomes across the requested time window.
Changelog	Draft the changelog between v1.4.0 and v1.5.0.	Builds release notes from captured task labels and outcomes rather than commit subjects.
Development journal	Append this week's work to docs/journal.md.	Adds a dated, artifact-linked record of shipped work, decisions, and open items.

Standups, client updates, and journals use activity windows such as yesterday or this week. Changelogs use a git ref range and can surface captured work whose commits may have been rebased. Reports can cover the current repository or, when the archive is enabled, captured work across projects.

Use orcaops-digest instead when you want the reviewer-facing account of one PR or artifact. Use orcaops-resume when you want to continue the work rather than report on it.

Understand and reuse prior work

Ask your agent	Skill	Result
Why does this validator exist?	orcaops-why	Traces a file, line, symbol, or concept to its captured checkpoint and reason.
Have we worked on authentication before?	orcaops-search	Searches captured artifacts across branches and archived projects.
Critique this plan against our prior decisions.	orcaops-plan-critique	Finds relevant prior art and stress-tests a draft before capture.
Replay how this feature came together.	orcaops-timetravel	Replays checkpoints; it can also bisect or salvage a captured attempt.
Import the existing git history.	orcaops-seed	Previews, then backfills older commits after explicit approval.

If provenance or search misses an older, uncaptured area, the agent may use the orcaops-seed-discovery history-gap skill to explain the cold coverage and recommend a seed. It does not import history without your approval.

Opt-in skills

Six shipped skills are available but disabled by default because their intents are specialized or their actions should remain deliberate:

Skill	Ask for
orcaops-loose-ends	Sweep current open items, deferred decisions, uncertainty, uncovered steps, and stale work.
orcaops-decisions	Recall recorded decisions and rejected alternatives, or promote them into ADRs.
orcaops-parallel-dispatch	Dispatch disjoint captured plan steps to concurrent subagents.
orcaops-estimate	Estimate a plan from the shape, checkpoints, and attributed usage of similar captured work.
orcaops-lessons	Turn recurring uncertainty and evaluator outcomes into evidence-linked lessons.
orcaops-blame	Export per-line agent provenance for a commit in the agent-trace format.

Enable an opt-in template, then refresh the generated support files:

orcaops skills enable <skill-id>
orcaops update

For example, use orcaops skills enable loose-ends. The blame skill also requires the matcher capability because it exports line-level provenance and can write a file or git note.

Diagnose and extend Orcaops

Ask your agent	Skill	Result
Is Orcaops set up correctly?	orcaops-doctor	Diagnoses adapters, environment, evaluator packs, caches, and watch state.
Make this failure mode an evaluator.	orcaops-author-evaluator	Guides a deliberate evaluator implementation and test loop.

Evaluator code can execute with your permissions. The authoring workflow stops at development registration and does not silently grant durable trust or enable the evaluator for a team. See Authoring evaluator packs for the underlying contracts.

Optional team and Cloud workflows

After authentication, additional skills can drive shared plan approval and web review feedback. Team or repository instructions can make them automatic for matching work; the prompts below are manual controls when you want to start or resume the workflow explicitly:

Ask your agent	Skill	Result
Get this plan approved.	orcaops-plan-approval	Uploads a plan, follows human feedback, and records the approved version.
Address the open review comments.	orcaops-review	Pulls review threads, replies to each acted-on thread, pushes, and waits.

These extend the local workflow; they do not make Cloud a prerequisite for capture, evaluation, search, or Task Review.

Complete skill index

This is the canonical index of the 26 skill templates shipped by Orcaops. The installed name is <prefix>-<id>; the table uses the default orcaops- prefix. “Default” means the template is selected automatically when its listed requirement is available. “Opt-in” templates appear in orcaops skills list but are installed only after you enable them.

Skill	State	Requirement	Purpose
orcaops-capture	Default	None	Capture or revise a task plan.
orcaops-checkpoint	Default	None	Open, close, or abandon a coherent work checkpoint.
orcaops-plan-approval	Default	Cloud	Drive web plan review and preserve the approved version.
orcaops-pre-pr	Default	None	Run the final evaluator pass before summary.
orcaops-finish	Default	None	Review and finalize a completed task in one workflow.
orcaops-summary	Default	None	Record the task outcome, verification, and open items.
orcaops-digest	Default	None	Render a reviewer-facing task account or PR body.
orcaops-why	Default	None	Trace a file, line, symbol, or concept to captured rationale.
orcaops-resume	Default	None	Continue an in-flight captured task.
orcaops-search	Default	None	Search captured artifacts across branches and archives.
orcaops-doctor	Default	None	Diagnose installation and runtime health.
orcaops-adversarial-review	Default	None	Challenge completion claims and unaccounted changes.
orcaops-loose-ends	Opt-in	None	Sweep everything captured work still owes.
orcaops-decisions	Opt-in	None	Recall decisions, reasons, and rejected alternatives.
orcaops-parallel-dispatch	Opt-in	None	Run disjoint plan steps through concurrent subagents.
orcaops-estimate	Opt-in	None	Ground estimates in similar captured task shapes and usage.
orcaops-lessons	Opt-in	None	Mine captured outcomes into evidence-linked lessons.
orcaops-timetravel	Default	Snapshot checkout	Replay, bisect, or salvage checkpoint-boundary trees.
orcaops-blame	Opt-in	Matcher	Export commit-level per-line agent provenance.
orcaops-recap	Default	None	Produce standups, changelogs, client updates, or journals.
orcaops-plan-critique	Default	None	Critique a draft plan against captured prior art.
orcaops-task-review	Default	None	Generate Task Review or address its local comments.
orcaops-review	Default	Cloud	Work shared PR review feedback and wait for another pass.
orcaops-seed	Default	None	Preview and backfill an existing repository's git history.
orcaops-seed-discovery	Default	None	Detect local history-coverage gaps and recommend seeding.
orcaops-author-evaluator	Default	None	Guide evaluator implementation through development testing.

If a skill does not trigger

1. Name it explicitly: “Use orcaops-resume to continue this work.”
2. Run orcaops doctor to check the selected agent and generated support files.
3. Run orcaops update after a CLI upgrade or agent-install change.
4. Confirm the current repository has been initialized with orcaops status.

Agent-specific slash commands are generated only where the adapter and install scope support them. Plain language and explicit skill names work across agents.