Agent skills
Agent skills
Eleven rd-* skills that teach Claude Code and Codex how to plan, file, build and ship work in Radial.
A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md in it. Your agent reads the description,
decides the skill applies, and follows the procedure inside. That is the whole
mechanism: no plugin, no runtime, no code executing on your machine that you
cannot read in a text editor.
The rd-* pack is eleven of them, covering the loop from "we should probably do
X" to an open pull request, plus four you run on their own to keep a backlog
honest. They are MIT and public:
read them, fork them, send a pull request.
Install in 60 seconds
radial skills installThat writes the pack into ~/.claude/skills and ~/.agents/skills. Restart
your agent, then type /rd-setup in Claude Code or $rd-setup in Codex.
Working in one repo rather than everywhere?
radial skills install --projectFull detail, including the other two installers and what to do when nothing shows up: Install and update.
The workflow, in order
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
rd-setup | CLI, sign-in, team, .radial/config.json, the agent instructions, the pack |
rd-plan | An idea becomes one parent and two to four children with acceptance criteria |
rd-prototype | One clickable HTML file, attached to the issue with a Preview URL |
rd-issues | Files the tree, wires the blocked-by edges, reads every issue back |
rd-build | Works the tree child by child: in progress, build, gate, notes, in review |
rd-verify | Resolves and runs this repo's gate, then reads the summary line |
rd-pr | Branch, base sync, commit, pull request with sibling ids scrubbed |
They chain, but nothing forces you through all seven. /rd-plan on its own is
useful. So is /rd-verify.
Hygiene, any time
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
rd-triage | Ranks open parents Now, Next, Later, Icebox from real signal |
rd-cleanup | Open children under done parents, closed or promoted on evidence |
rd-changelog | Completed issues become Feature, Improvement and Fix entries |
rd-retro | Scores one finished build against the workflow, with evidence |
Three things worth knowing before you start
The description is the interface
Your agent picks a skill by reading its description frontmatter and nothing
else. That is why each one names Radial, the issue tracker, and the client it
runs in, and why you invoke a skill by describing your situation rather than by
memorising its name.
They read and write through the radial CLI
Which means they respect your session, your scope and your team. A read-scoped
key stops /rd-issues at the first create with a clear message, rather than
half-filing a tree.
A tree ends in review, never done
/rd-build moves each child to in review and stops. Closing is a human
decision, and a workflow that closes its own work hides the moment someone
should look at it.
Change them without forking them
Every skill has named extension points. You write a small wrapper that adds your rules at those points and keep receiving updates to the skill itself:
radial skills extend rd-build --name team-buildSee Extending a skill.
Where the files live
| Path | What it is | Commit it? |
|---|---|---|
.radial/config.json | The team key for this repo | yes |
.radial/skills/<name>/ | Your wrappers | yes |
.radial/changelog.md | What rd-changelog writes | yes |
.radial/plans/ | Plan bodies, scaffolding for rd-issues | no |
.radial/prototypes/ | Prototype HTML before it is attached | no |
radial skills update picks up new versions; radial skills list shows what
you have against what is published.