feat: add operating fundamentals for pure orchestration

[ruby-dlee]

Intent

Crystallize firstmate's durable operating fundamentals from the supplied recovery source into one concise agent-only skill, stripped of incident-specific provider, account, tool, crew, and task details. Encode seven principles: remain a pure orchestrator by turning every captain ask into both a durable backlog item and tracked crew assignment and never doing project or deliverable work inline; saturate available lanes; route around blockers; decouple shared validation from worker budgets; reap completed resources continuously; obey explicit captain orders within non-overridable constraints; and verify before asserting. Keep SKILL.md at or below 90 lines with concrete triggering situations in folded metadata, wire only a single conditional load trigger into AGENTS.md section 13, add no new every-turn inline rule because AGENTS.md section 1 already carries the always-loaded delegation contract and size and one-owner discipline matter, do not add maintenance boilerplate, and make no unrelated edits.

What Changed

• Add an agent-only operating fundamentals skill covering pure orchestration, lane saturation, blocker routing, independent validation capacity, resource reaping, explicit orders, and verified assertions.
• Wire the skill into conditional agent guidance and align X-mode handling and documentation with its tracked-work orchestration contract.
• Add contract tests for the skill’s metadata, size limit, seven principles, load trigger, provider neutrality, and boilerplate exclusions.

Risk Assessment

✅ Low: Captain, the narrowly scoped documentation change cleanly encodes all seven required principles in a 55-line internal skill, adds only the required Section 13 trigger, and introduces no material source risk.

Testing

The full configured baseline was already green, and the new focused test plus manual loader, routing, content, size, and diff-scope checks all passed. This is an agent-only Markdown instruction surface with no rendered UI, so direct CLI evidence was captured instead of a screenshot.

Evidence: End-to-end skill loader, routing, principles, scope, and focused-test evidence

Firstmate operating-fundamentals end-to-end evidence

Loader-facing frontmatter (parsed as YAML)
name: operating-fundamentals
description: Agent-only operating practice for firstmate. Use when intaking any captain ask, deciding whether to dispatch or work inline, supervising under load, handling a blocked lane or a finished crew, protecting shared validation capacity, acting on an explicit captain order, or about to assert a fleet fact.
user-invocable: false
metadata.internal: true

Conditional routing surface (AGENTS.md section 13)
- `operating-fundamentals` - load when intaking any captain ask, deciding whether to dispatch or work inline, supervising under load, handling a blocked lane or finished crew, protecting shared validation capacity, acting on an explicit captain order, or about to assert a fleet fact.

Loaded operating principles
1. Orchestrate; never work inline
2. Saturate every available lane
3. Route around blockers
4. Decouple validation from worker budgets
5. Reap continuously
6. Obey explicit orders decisively
7. Always check before asserting

Line budget
55/90 lines

Target commit scope
A	.agents/skills/operating-fundamentals/SKILL.md
M	AGENTS.md

Focused acceptance-contract test
ok - operating-fundamentals has folded agent-only frontmatter, concrete triggers, and stays within 90 lines
ok - operating-fundamentals encodes all seven principles in the required order
ok - AGENTS.md contains one conditional section-13 trigger and no every-turn duplicate
ok - operating-fundamentals stays provider-neutral and omits incident and maintenance detail

Pipeline

Updates from git push no-mistakes

✅ **intent** - passed

✅ No issues found.

✅ **Rebase** - passed

✅ No issues found.

✅ **Review** - passed

✅ No issues found.

✅ **Test** - passed

✅ No issues found.

• command -v tmux >/dev/null || { echo "tmux is required for e2e tests" >&2; exit 1; }; tmux -V; rc=0; for t in tests/*.test.sh; do echo "== $t =="; bash "$t" || rc=1; done; uv run --directory tools/agent-fleet --locked pytest || rc=1; uv run --directory tools/agent-fleet --locked python -m compileall -q src || rc=1; exit "$rc"
• Configured baseline (already completed successfully): command -v tmux >/dev/null || { echo "tmux is required for e2e tests" >&2; exit 1; }; tmux -V; rc=0; for t in tests/*.test.sh; do echo "== $t =="; bash "$t" || rc=1; done; uv run --directory tools/agent-fleet --locked pytest || rc=1; uv run --directory tools/agent-fleet --locked python -m compileall -q src || rc=1; exit "$rc"
• Focused regression: bash tests/operating-fundamentals.test.sh
• Parsed loader metadata: ruby -ryaml -e '...' .agents/skills/operating-fundamentals/SKILL.md
• Verified routing and scope with section-13 extraction, the 55/90 line count, seven ordered headings, and git diff --name-status b4b16035a074e92eb0ac816149635f7d35d7a99d..d85d2ca89d11eea88b5f3c5ee8b8b13bb3e49048
• Captured and read back /var/folders/y_/bfdbj_vx20l9b9tw7crgkzwm0000gn/T/no-mistakes-evidence/01KY3E57H7YWH78RCWQNSE6WB1/operating-fundamentals-e2e.txt

✅ **Document** - passed

✅ No issues found.

🔧 **Lint** - 1 issue found → auto-fixed ✅

• ⚠️ linter found issues (exit code 1)

🔧 Fix: Fix ShellCheck literal quoting warnings
✅ Re-checked - no issues remain.

✅ **Push** - passed

✅ No issues found.

[ruby-dlee]

I reviewed the complete current diff, including the new 55-line skill, its focused contract test, and the X-mode/doc ownership integration. The frontmatter is valid and agent-only, the description names concrete intake/supervision/verification triggers, and all seven fundamentals are principle-level rather than incident- or provider-specific. In particular, shared validation is decoupled from an exhaustible worker budget without preferring a provider. The X-mode and documentation edits replace duplicated lifecycle wording with ownership pointers to the new contract; they do not introduce a separate concern.

Verdict: ready.