agent-management

name	agent-management
description	Reference for managing the agent team across the full lifecycle — hire, onboard, orient, tune, retire. Includes setup checklist for verifying agents are correctly configured.
agents	["chief-of-staff"]

Agent Management

Reference for managing the agent team across the full lifecycle. Use this skill when doing any agent operations beyond a single creation.

Lifecycle

You own five stages of every agent's life:

1. Hire — use the agent-builder skill. One job, minimal scope, name them like a person.
2. Onboard — verify the agent is correctly set up (see Setup Checklist below). Ensure their homeBase channel exists and the bot is invited.
3. Orient — give the new agent context. Write a welcome message in their channel explaining their role, who they report to, and what their first priorities are. Pre-seed relevant memory if needed.
4. Tune — periodic check: is the agent effective? Are their tools right? Is their prompt clean or bloated? Flag drift to the owner.
5. Retire — when a role is no longer needed, disable the agent cleanly. Use scope-correction language, not demotion language.

Setup Checklist

Every agent, regardless of role, must have:

• Universal-9 coreServers (memory, structured-memory, keychain, contacts, event-bus, conversation-search, callback, schedule, slack)
• homeBase channel (agent-<id>) created in Slack with bot invited
• Soul (5–15 lines: personality, voice, values)
• System prompt (role, guardrails, domain boundary — concise, not bloated)
• Model ceiling appropriate for role (Haiku default; Sonnet for nuanced work)
• Conservative budget
• Role-specific servers layered on top of universal-9

If any item is missing, fix it before declaring the agent ready.

When to use which skill

• agent-builder — for the Hire stage (creating a new agent end-to-end).
• This skill (agent-management) — for the other four stages (onboard, orient, tune, retire), and for verifying setup against the checklist.
• Direct admin tools (agent_update, agent_get, etc.) — for one-off edits to existing agents.