| name | caretaker |
| description | Run the bounded harness caretaker — deterministic state gather (predictions, verifier gain, agent health, sensors, drift), then triage ONLY what's flagged under a hard authority boundary (files work, never ships changes). Triggers on /caretaker, "run the caretaker", "harness health check". |
| when_to_use | Daily (schedule it), after a heavy multi-session day, or whenever you want a fleet-health snapshot without spending tokens on a full audit. NOT for fixing things — the caretaker files work; humans (or explicit follow-up commands) ship it. |
| allowed-tools | Bash, Read, Edit |
/caretaker — bounded harness caretaker
Deterministic-first (LOOP pattern): all state gathering is compiled into a
script; the LLM reasons only about what's flagged.
Step 1 — gather
~/.claude/scripts/caretaker-daily.sh
- Exit 0: output its one-liner verbatim and STOP. No further tool calls.
- Exit 1: triage the listed action items under the authority boundary.
Authority boundary (hard rules)
The caretaker files work, it never ships:
MAY:
- Read anything under
~/.claude (telemetry, rl, sensor-triage notes, lessons-inbox)
- Run read-only diagnostics (
rg, git status/log, gh run view, launchctl print)
- Assemble evidence for a WRONG prediction or degrading agent (≥2 items) into
~/.claude/rl/tuning-evidence.md and recommend the exact /tune-agent or
revert command
- Consolidate sensor-triage notes into one diagnosis
- Move processed tuning-evidence entries under a
## Processed <date> heading
(that ONE file is the only thing it edits)
- Post one notification:
osascript -e 'display notification "..." with title "caretaker"'
MUST NEVER:
- Edit rules/, CLAUDE.md, agents/, skills/, hooks/, settings, or any code
- Promote candidates, apply mining patches, or run /tune-agent itself
- Restart services, push git, delete files, spawn agent fleets
- Exceed ~20 tool calls; if triage is bigger, say so and stop
Interpretation guidance
- A cost anomaly on a day of heavy interactive use is expected — flag it
prominently only if cache hit rate also fell below 85%.
- One sensor anomaly = read its triage note; repeated anomalies from the same
sensor within the cooldown window = the underlying issue persists, escalate
in the notification.
- A degrading agent needs ≥2 concrete evidence items before it becomes a
/tune-agent recommendation (one bad day is noise).
- A starving loop item (from
check-loop-liveness.sh) means a closed
loop's output artifact is stale/missing even though its process may be
ticking — the highest-severity class here, because it is invisible in
normal logs (2026-07 rating-drip outage: two weeks of healthy-looking
ticks, zero delivered questions). Diagnose which stage of the loop starved
(producer, transport, or consumer) and file the evidence + exact fix
command; do NOT restart services yourself. A loop that is intentionally
finished (e.g. rating sheet complete) is auto-exempted by the script — if
it flags anyway, the exemption logic is the bug to report.
Output
End with: what was found, what was filed where, and the exact next commands
for a human. One notification, no essays.
Scheduling
Best run automatically once a day. Claude Code desktop: create a scheduled
task with this skill as the prompt (see templates/caretaker-scheduled-task.md
in the claude-agent-os repo). Headless: cron a budget-capped session:
47 6 * * * ~/.local/bin/claude -p --max-budget-usd 2 --max-turns 25 "/caretaker"
