Skills

Use this section when you want to choose the right OAT skill for a task. If you are writing or changing skills, jump to the contributor docs instead.

Contents

• Writing Skills - Contributor guide to skill authoring, contracts, and governance.
• Docs Workflows - How docs CLI helpers and docs skills work together.
• Explainer Kit - Core and OAT adapter usage, recipes and expansion profiles, the two authoring paths, warnings and QA severity, themes, lifecycle policy, durability, and publishing.
• Explainer Provider Integration - Provider-neutral planner, author, trusted browser-session, and visual-critic contracts.
• Repo Improve - Source modes, external-plan boundaries, optional tracking, and OAT import handoff.
• Recon Evidence Packets - Approved worker profiles, validated claim states, packet layout, partial outcomes, and directory-only handoff.

Key Skills by Use Case

• Start a new tracked project: oat-project-new, oat-project-quick-start, or oat-project-lite for a single-sitting change with one batched interview and one approval (quick start accepts a project name plus optional description; if you omit the description it should ask before discovery begins)
• Resume an existing project: oat-project-open and oat-project-progress
• Execute a ready plan: oat-project-implement
• Import an existing plan: oat-project-import-plan
• Split a broad discovery or brainstorm into child projects: oat-project-split
• Retroactively capture existing work: oat-project-capture
• Run or receive reviews: oat-project-review-provide, oat-project-review-receive, or the non-project review variants
• Generate an evidence-grounded project retrospective, apply approved repo improvements, or file tracker feedback: oat-project-retro and oat-project-retro-file. See Project Retrospectives.
• Capture a scoped, shippable backlog item: oat-pjm-add-backlog-item directly when the work is already scoped, or oat-brainstorm when the thought hasn't converged yet — the brainstorm dispatcher's "scoped backlog item" destination pre-fills the title / description / acceptance criteria / scope estimate / priority from the conversation and then runs oat-pjm-add-backlog-item with confirmed inputs
• Manage the repo backlog and reference docs: oat-pjm-update-repo-reference, oat-pjm-review-backlog
• Operate an explicit GitHub, Linear, or Jira planning-record binding through a live host capability: oat-pjm-remote. The OAT CLI retains policy, preview, approval, journal, and verification authority; the skill discovers and invokes only the exact host action emitted for one durable operation.
• Turn a repo audit, maintainability review, backlog review, backlog directory, or backlog item into standalone external implementation plans: oat-repo-improve. Plans land under .oat/repo/reference/external-plans/; execute them directly or optionally pass one to oat-project-import-plan for tracked OAT execution.
• Choose what to delegate and route bounded work by task class across Codex, Claude, or Cursor: subagent-orchestration. It is self-contained and usable without OAT; live catalogs and current instructions take precedence over its dated provider examples.
• Build visual project explainers and final project recaps: oat-explainer-kit, backed by the destination-neutral explainer-kit core. See Explainer Kit.
• Work on docs surfaces: authoring-docs (general documentation baseline), oat-docs-authoring (targeted OAT/Fumadocs authoring), oat-docs-bootstrap (guided bootstrap of a new docs app), oat-docs-analyze, oat-docs-apply, and oat-project-document
• Generate a shipping digest or scheduled recap: oat-wrap-up
• Run a wave program over a corpus of external plans: oat-wave-program (durable program artifact: new/refresh/wave-close) and oat-wave-execute (one wave as a wrapper project) — see Wave Workflows
• Research a topic in depth: deep-research
• Acquire and validate bounded evidence for another workflow: recon
• Analyze an artifact, codebase, or document: analyze
• Compare options with domain-aware dimensions: compare
• Verify a claim adversarially: skeptic
• Merge multiple analysis artifacts: synthesize
• Capture or refine ideas: oat-idea-new (capture a new idea), oat-idea-ideate (resume an existing tracked idea or expand a scratchpad seed — not for blank-slate brainstorms; use oat-brainstorm for those), oat-idea-scratchpad, oat-idea-summarize
• Run a project-independent brainstorming conversation: oat-brainstorm — entry point with an explicit activation contract. Hard Activation fires only on the brainstorm verb ("let's brainstorm", "brainstorm this", "can we brainstorm X", "help me brainstorm X", or /oat-brainstorm); ambiguous exploratory phrasing answers conversationally without the banner and offers structured mode only after sustained exploration. Once entered, runs a structured design conversation (one question at a time, 2-3 approaches with a recommendation) and routes to inline / doc-to-path / idea / backlog item / project handoffs based on installed packs. See Tool Packs for the brainstorm pack details.

Remote host execution loop

Use oat-pjm-remote only for an explicit remote lifecycle request. Its loop is deliberately narrow:

1. Before the first provider-contacting command, inspect currently granted MCP or connector descriptions for a semantic and exact-context match.
2. If no capable connector is available, inspect an already configured provider CLI's live help before the first attempt. Do not install a tool, retain its dialect, or switch execution surfaces mid-attempt.
3. Construct only bounded provider-neutral capability evidence and pass it to the requested command with --capability-evidence-stdin. Treat the CLI's policy, preview, approval, safety, and durable state as authoritative.
4. When the CLI returns pending with externalAction, execute that exact semantic action at most once and submit one bounded, sanitized observation with oat pjm remote operation continue.
5. Continue only when the CLI emits another exact action for the same durable operation. Stop on its terminal envelope.

The skill cannot broaden the normalized projection, bypass effective policy, binding clamps, purpose field grants, hard approval floors, or caller-owned authority evidence, read credential values, persist native provider data, or declare remote success. A connector result, process exit, or visible remote change is only evidence. Success requires an OAT ok envelope after authoritative read-back. See Remote Project Management for policy, storage, approval, and recovery details.

If You Are Trying To...

• choose the right skill for a task, stay in this guide page
• write or update a skill, use Writing Skills
• understand how docs-specific skills fit with docs commands, use Docs Workflows

Full Catalog

Discovery Source

AGENTS.md is the session-facing registry. It should stay aligned with skill frontmatter and the canonical skill directories under .agents/skills/.

Legacy compatibility note: review-backlog and update-repo-reference may still exist in some environments, but prefer the oat-pjm-* family for the current file-backed backlog/reference workflow.