Quality-first orchestration for coding agents.
Work turns a request into one exact goal, gives specialists complete bounded briefs, and keeps the parent responsible for integration and proof. It is a portable Agent Skill for Codex and other compatible coding agents.
npx skills add xcaeser/work-skill --skill work --agent codex --global --yesInstall one focused mode by pointing the CLI at its folder:
npx skills add https://github.com/xcaeser/work-skill/tree/main/skills/work-plan \
--agent codex --global --yes$work Fix the intermittent login failure and ship the smallest verified repair.
$work 2 sol xhigh Investigate the data-loss report and implement the durable fix.
If no team size is given, Work chooses the smallest useful team. Explicit model, effort, and count requests remain under the user's control.
| Skill | Purpose |
|---|---|
$work |
Implement a task with an accountable parent lead |
$work-init |
Start a project with a minimal verified setup |
$work-plan |
Produce a detailed read-only implementation plan |
$work-audit |
Audit code, diffs, or runtime flows |
$work-clean |
Find smells, overengineering, and package opportunities |
$work-quality |
Pass the Work golden rules into the conversation |
$work-status |
Show the current goal, agents, evidence, and blockers |
$work-help |
Show the available Work skills |
- Define one goal, ownership boundary, done criteria, and validation path.
- Launch the smallest useful team with complete executor briefs.
- Keep materially different approaches independent until their real strengths and gaps are visible; track the approach families explicitly.
- Require concrete changes, tests, lemmas, or other evidence—not status or optimism. Agents work until they finish or report a real blocker.
- Use adversarial checks, then have the parent integrate, verify, and report remaining gaps. Reopen a blocked route only with a genuinely new mechanism.
These principles are informed by OpenAI's proof prompt: diverse exploration, explicit route tracking, adversarial review, concrete evidence, and no premature return. Work applies that discipline to coding tasks; the PDF is not a Work API or model-pricing specification.
- Software should not break, demand attention, or exceed its purpose.
- Keep decisions human-owned and user-facing writing human-readable.
- “Your work is done when it looks so simple that the consumer thinks they could have done it, which means they won’t appreciate how hard you worked.” — Visualize Value.
- Prefer the smallest reliable change and remove obsolete compatibility paths.
- Treat “done” as a claim that current evidence proves.
- Choose the simplest implementation that fully meets current requirements.
- Grow in working layers; never trade a working product for unfinished complexity.
- Keep components modular and concerns clearly separated.
- Check existing dependencies, documentation, and types before reimplementing functionality or adding a package.
- Make architectural decisions for the long term, not as temporary stopgaps.
npx skills add . --list --full-depth
git diff --checkEach skill is a portable directory with SKILL.md frontmatter. The package
has no runtime dependencies or bundled services.
MIT. See LICENSE.