instar

Instar-specific development skill used by the instar-developing agent (Echo, or any agent assigned instar-dev responsibilities). Wraps /build with mandatory side-effects review, signal-vs-authority principle check, and artifact generation. Structural enforcement via pre-commit/pre-push hooks — the instar repo refuses commits and pushes that didn't come through this skill. NOT a user-facing skill — end users should never invoke it.

Enter autonomous development mode with STRUCTURAL enforcement. Uses a stop hook to prevent premature exit. Generates stop conditions and confirms with user before starting. Work independently for a specified duration with progress reporting.

Run any "find all instances of X" sweep — a security audit, a safety audit, a code review, a research question, a compliance check — as an iterative loop that does NOT stop at one pass. Audit → fix → RE-audit → … until a clean pass returns zero NEW discoveries. Use whenever thoroughness matters and a single pass would miss things. Trigger words: audit, sweep, find all, review everything, comprehensive, thorough, exhaustive, security review, safety audit, no stone unturned, did we get everything, convergence.

Iteratively review an instar-development spec with multi-angle internal reviewers (security, scalability, adversarial, integration, decision-completeness, lessons-aware) and real cross-model external reviewers routed through the agent's own installed CLIs (codex → GPT-tier, gemini → Gemini-tier; one pass per available family) until convergence, then produce a comprehensive ELI10 convergence report. Output is a spec tagged review-convergence — one of the two tags /instar-dev requires before it will touch instar source. NOT user-invocable; run by the instar-developing agent before any spec-driven /instar-dev work.

Establish and recover persistent agent identity that survives context compaction, session restarts, and autonomous operation. Use when an agent needs to know who it is, recover after context compression, orient at session start, or understand the identity infrastructure. Trigger words: who am I, remember, identity, after restart, compaction, context loss, who am I working with, my principles.

Schedule recurring agent tasks using cron expressions. Use when the user asks to run something on a schedule, check something periodically, automate a recurring task, set up a cron job, or wants work to happen while they're away. Trigger words: schedule, recurring, cron, every hour, every day, run daily, periodic, automated.

Ingest URLs, documents, and transcripts into a searchable knowledge base. Query past research and curated documentation using full-text search. Trigger words: ingest, knowledge base, look up, search knowledge, what do we know about, research, index this, add to knowledge base.

View this agent's digital passport (identity + trust + allowed/forbidden actions) and verify a peer's passport against a proposed action (EXO 3.0).

Score a task or workflow on its coordination-vs-judgment ratio to tell whether it's a good agent candidate (EXO 3.0 task-decomposition matrix).

Deploy the current instar dist into a throwaway agent home and verify the deploy is healthy — clean evidence instead of post-hoc log forensics. Use BEFORE shipping a change that touches the deploy/lifeline/server path; AFTER landing such a change; or to reproduce a crash observed in the wild.

Rigorous build process with worktree isolation, structured phases, quality gates, layered testing, observability, and self-improvement. Use for any substantial build task. Structurally enforced via stop hook.

string # required — natural-language intent matcher

Register, inspect, and drive multi-spec projects via the instar /projects API. Twelve subcommands cover the full Phase 1 surface — create / status / next / advance / drift / run-round / halt / ack / resume / abandon / accept-partial / claim-ownership.

Focused micro-skill for secret management setup. Explains options, guides through Bitwarden installation/login/unlock, configures backend. Exits when done.

Interactive conversational setup wizard for instar. Walks users through initial configuration and identity bootstrapping conversationally.

Structured 4-phase debugging methodology that prevents blind probing and guesswork. Forces root cause identification before any fix attempt. Use when encountering bugs, errors, unexpected behavior, test failures, or when something "just stopped working." Trigger words: debug, bug, error, broken, not working, fix this, something's wrong, investigate, root cause, why is this failing, trace the issue.

Submit structured feedback about instar bugs, feature requests, improvements, or innovations worth sharing. Use when something isn't working, when a feature is missing, when you've built something that could benefit all agents, or when the user mentions a problem with instar. Also use proactively after building significant features — ask yourself if other agents would benefit. Feedback is relayed agent-to-agent to instar maintainers. Trigger words: bug report, feedback, issue, something's wrong, feature request, this isn't working, improvement, suggest, built something useful, other agents could use this.

PostToolUse hook that scans Bash tool output for leaked credentials — API keys, tokens, private keys, and secrets — before they reach the conversation. Blocks critical leaks, redacts high-severity matches, and warns on suspicious patterns. 14 detection patterns covering OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Stripe, Google, Slack, SendGrid, Twilio, PEM keys, bearer tokens, and generic secrets. No external dependencies. Trigger words: security, credential leak, secret exposure, key detection, token scan, API key leaked, credential guard, secret scanner, prevent credential leak.

Set up persistent agent identity files (AGENT.md, USER.md, MEMORY.md) and teach the agent to read them at every session start. Works in any Claude Code project — no external dependencies required. Trigger words: who am I, identity, remember me, agent name, my principles, who are you, what are my values.

Teach cross-session memory patterns using MEMORY.md — what to save, how to organize it, how to maintain it over time, and how to structure topic files as memory grows. Works in any Claude Code project with no external dependencies. Trigger words: remember this, save for later, across sessions, persistent memory, don't forget, note this, keep this, write this down.

Set up a PreToolUse hook in .claude/settings.json that blocks dangerous commands — rm -rf, force push, database drops, and others — before they execute. Teaches the pattern of safety hooks for any Claude Code project. Trigger words: safety, guard, block dangerous, protect, prevent destructive, safe mode, dangerous commands, risky operations.

Spawn, monitor, and communicate with persistent Claude Code sessions running in the background. Use when a task needs to run without blocking the current session, when the user asks to do something in the background, or when a long-running task needs its own context window. Trigger words: background task, spawn session, persistent, run in background, parallel, separate session, async task.

Send and receive messages via Telegram for two-way agent communication. Use when the agent needs to notify the user, alert them about something, relay a response, or when Telegram messaging is the requested channel. Trigger words: send message, Telegram, notify, alert user, message me, ping me, let me know, reach out.

Fetch web content efficiently by checking llms.txt first, then Cloudflare markdown endpoints, then falling back to HTML. Reduces token usage by 80% on sites that support clean markdown delivery. No external dependencies — installs a single Python script. Trigger words: fetch URL, web content, read website, scrape page, download page, get webpage, read this link.