ato-make-agent

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.