What this skill does
You install skills. You want some of them to act as full agents that can
be summoned into war-rooms (via ato-warroom). This skill is the
converter.
Inputs:
- A source skill (path to SKILL.md, or skill name to look up in standard
locations).
- An agent slug (short, lowercase, hyphenated — e.g.,
cso, eng-mgr).
- A model roster: primary + 1–2 alts. Cross-family is the point.
- Scope: project-vendored or user-global.
Outputs:
.claude/agents/<slug>.md (or ~/.claude/agents/<slug>.md) with the
persona system prompt + the model roster recorded in frontmatter so
ato-warroom knows which runtimes to dispatch to.- A one-line addition to the project's agent inventory (if a
WARROOM-ROSTER.md
is present in the repo root).
This skill does NOT:
- Create the ATO SQLite
agents row. That's the desktop's
Create Agent wizard's job — and ato-make-agent's output file is
importable by it on next refresh.
- Pick the persona for you. You decide which skill becomes which agent.
When to fire
- "Turn
<skill> into an agent." / "Register <skill> as a war-room voice."
- About to use
ato-warroom and realize the role you want isn't in your
current agent roster yet.
- Re-tuning an existing agent's model roster.
Skip:
- Trivial single-prompt scratchwork.
- Skills that are pure tooling (e.g.,
gstack-upgrade, setup-deploy).
Those aren't personas. Convert only skills that codify a role with
forcing questions or methodology (e.g., cso, plan-ceo-review,
office-hours, investigate).
Procedure
1. Locate the source skill
If the user gave a path, use it. If they gave a name, search standard
locations:
SLUG="$1" # the source skill name from user
for candidate in \
"$PWD/.claude/skills/$SLUG/SKILL.md" \
"$HOME/.claude/skills/$SLUG/SKILL.md" \
"$HOME/.claude/skills/gstack/$SLUG/SKILL.md" ; do
if [ -f "$candidate" ]; then
SOURCE="$candidate"
break
fi
done
echo "SOURCE=$SOURCE"
If nothing found, list available skills and ask.
2. Decide agent slug, name, scope, roster — ask once
Use AskUserQuestion (one call, multiple questions) to gather:
- Agent slug — short, lowercase, hyphenated. Default: same as source skill slug.
- Display name — human-readable. Default: title-case of slug.
- Scope —
project (commits to .claude/agents/) or global (~/.claude/agents/). Default: project for repo-local work, global for cross-project roles.
- Primary model — Claude Opus / Claude Sonnet / Codex / MiniMax / Gemini / DeepSeek / Grok / Ollama-local. Default: Claude Opus for heavyweight (CEO, CSO, eng-manager) personas, Claude Sonnet otherwise.
- Alt model #1 — required. Must be a DIFFERENT family from primary so cross-family dispatch produces real disagreement. Default: MiniMax if primary is Claude.
- Alt model #2 — optional. Another different family. Default: skip if alt #1 covers the cross-family need.
Don't ask in five separate turns. One AskUserQuestion call, multi-question.
3. Extract persona from the source SKILL.md
Read the source. The persona-relevant content is usually:
- Frontmatter
description — keep as one-line summary
- Sections about voice, methodology, forcing questions, anti-patterns,
"instructions", "phases" — keep
- Runtime boilerplate (preamble blocks, telemetry, plan-mode safe
ops, skill routing, completion status protocols, operational
self-improvement, update-check pings, etc.) — strip. These run the
source skill in its host environment; the dispatched agent doesn't
need them.
Heuristic rules for stripping (calibrated to common skill stacks like
gstack — substitute equivalents for whatever stack you're working
with):
- Drop code blocks that read from skill-stack config dirs (e.g.
~/.gstack/), call stack-specific config commands (e.g.
gstack-config), emit telemetry/session env vars (_TEL,
_SESSION_ID, _LEARN_FILE), or run update-check probes.
- Drop sections whose titles are obviously about skill-runtime housekeeping
rather than persona — e.g.
## Preamble, ## Plan Mode Safe Operations,
## Skill Invocation During Plan Mode, ## Skill routing,
## AskUserQuestion Format, ## Artifacts Sync,
## Model-Specific Behavioral Patch, ## Voice (when it's about
speech-to-text trigger phrases for the host skill, not the persona's
written voice), ## Context Recovery, ## Writing Style,
## Question Tuning, ## Completion Status Protocol,
## Operational Self-Improvement, ## Telemetry,
## Plan Status Footer.
- Keep everything under sections titled
## Instructions,
## Phase N:, ## Confidence Calibration, ## Important Rules,
## Disclaimer, anything explaining the role's methodology /
forcing questions / anti-patterns / output format.
- Keep the
# <Title> heading (becomes the agent display name) and the
one-line intro paragraph (becomes the agent description).
If unsure whether a section is persona or runtime, default to KEEP and
flag for manual trim — overzealous stripping is worse than a little
bloat.
4. Compose the agent file
Frontmatter template:
---
name: <slug>
display_name: <display name>
description: <one-line summary>
model: <primary model>
roster:
primary: <primary model>
alt1: <alt #1>
alt2: <alt #2 or omitted>
source_skill: <path or slug of source>
filter_framework: <name or 'none'> # e.g. karpathy, spade, rice, custom
---
filter_framework signals to ato-warroom which failure-mode filter
to wrap around every dispatched turn. Default value: karpathy (the
four-mode filter wrapped in the body template below). Substitute or
set to none if the persona doesn't need a wrapper.
Body template:
# <display name>
## Role
<extracted persona intro from source skill>
## Methodology
<extracted phases / forcing questions / anti-patterns>
## Failure-mode filter (run on every turn)
[Default: Karpathy's four. Swap the categories below if you've chosen a
different framework in frontmatter.]
For each response, comment explicitly on:
1. **Wrong assumptions** — what is the user assuming that may not hold?
2. **Overcomplexity** — what simpler shape would ship 80% of the value?
3. **Orthogonal edits** — what's in scope that doesn't belong to the
stated goal?
4. **Imperative-over-declarative** — is the goal expressed as
verifiable outcomes + tests, or as a sequence of steps?
Then commit to a position. Brief — bullets, not essays.
5. Write the file
TARGET_DIR=""
if [ "$SCOPE" = "global" ]; then
TARGET_DIR="$HOME/.claude/agents"
else
TARGET_DIR="$PWD/.claude/agents"
fi
mkdir -p "$TARGET_DIR"
TARGET="$TARGET_DIR/$AGENT_SLUG.md"
if [ -f "$TARGET" ]; then
# Don't clobber. Ask whether to overwrite or pick a new slug.
echo "EXISTS: $TARGET"
exit 7 # caller handles
fi
# write file from composed template
6. Report
Print to user:
✓ Wrote <slug> to <path>
Primary model: <primary>
Alt roster: <alt1>[, <alt2>]
Source skill: <source path>
Summon in war-rooms via:
Task(<slug>) # in-session, primary model
ato dispatch <runtime> --agent <slug> # cross-family, alt model
(If `ato dispatch --agent` doesn't load system_prompt yet on your
ATO build, prepend the agent's persona text manually until v2.6 PR-A.5
lands. See ato-warroom skill's "fallback for label-only --agent" section.)
Anti-patterns
- Pre-building a full roster the user didn't ask for. This skill is
on-demand. Convert one skill at a time when the user needs that voice.
- Same-family alt model. Claude Opus primary + Claude Sonnet alt is
not cross-family. Defeats the war-room's purpose. Force the alt to a
different vendor (e.g. MiniMax, Gemini, DeepSeek, Codex, Grok — pick
whichever your install has).
- Including the source skill's runtime preambles in the persona. The
dispatch target runs as a one-shot turn, not inside the source skill's
host environment — strip telemetry / update-check / session-tracking
blocks aggressively.
- Skipping the failure-mode filter section. Without it the agent is
just "a model with a system prompt" — not a war-room voice.
- Vendoring an agent globally that's repo-specific. A persona built
around a specific codebase belongs at
<repo>/.claude/agents/ so
teammates inherit it; a generic role (e.g. security-reviewer) belongs
at ~/.claude/agents/.
Pairs with
ato-warroom — the consumer. Summons agents created by this skill
into pre-decision multi-perspective war-rooms.ato-review — post-code diff review. Different lane; runs after
drafting, not before. Doesn't use the agent roster (yet).- Any persona-shaped skill in your installed stack — gstack, custom,
third-party, or hand-authored SKILL.md files. Run
ato-make-agent on
each one you want as a permanent war-room voice. The skill doesn't
require gstack; it works with any source that has a frontmatter +
Markdown shape.
Origin
The user (Will) explicitly rejected pre-vending a fixed war-room roster:
different installs have different skill sets, and the right primitive is
"let users build their own roster from skills they actually have."
This skill is that primitive. The companion ato-warroom summons from
whatever roster the user has built.