A Claude Code skill for running a two-agent build loop: a secondary code agent CLI (opencode/deepseek, agy/Gemini, or similar) does the implementation, while the primary agent writes the instructions, monitors the run, and independently reviews, verifies, and commits every diff.
Battle-tested building a Rust raster-to-SVG engine, where it survived — and now documents defenses against — the full catalogue of delegation failure modes:
- dispatches reporting PASS over visually destroyed output (with aggregate metrics agreeing)
- dispatches silently changing spec constants to make their own checks pass
- dispatches "fixing" engine bugs in the test harness instead of the engine
- silent mid-flight death leaving the tree mid-surgery
- a
git checkout <file>mid-dispatch destroying ~150 uncommitted edits - default print timeouts killing hour-scale runs
- quota exhaustion, billing blocks, and silently-broken model routes
- An ordered tool-chain-with-fallbacks discipline (primary CLI → fallback CLI → implement yourself under the same review gates)
- An instruction-file template (scope fencing, verbatim contracts and constants, anti-fabrication guardrails, self-verification requirements)
- Monitoring and stall detection that distinguishes "slow" from "hung" (write-event counting, process liveness) instead of blind polling
- A hard rule against
git checkout/restore/resetmid-dispatch, with the war story that earned it - Parallel dispatch sequencing rules (disjoint modules only; shared files serialize)
- A ten-point independent review checklist, including: recompute every metric yourself, diff every constant against the spec, check which layer the diff landed in, and — for anything visual — render the artifact and look at it, because metric gates are necessary but never sufficient
Copy the skill into a project (project-scoped):
mkdir -p .claude/skills
cp -r skills/dispatch .claude/skills/or into your user scope so every project gets it:
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -r skills/dispatch ~/.claude/skills/Claude Code discovers it automatically; it activates when you ask to dispatch/delegate implementation work, or you can invoke it directly with /dispatch.
The skill is tool-agnostic and project-agnostic. On first use in a repo, fill in the "Project adaptation" section at the top of SKILL.md:
- the authoritative spec file dispatches must cite
- shared convergence files no two dispatches may touch concurrently
- the verification command block (format, build, lint-as-error, tests)
- hard invariants to restate in every relevant prompt (determinism, licensing boundaries)
- golden/fixture harnesses and the metric deltas dispatches must report
MIT