| name | communicate |
| description | Cross-repo + mesh communication from agentfront (vendored from steward): file tracked GitHub issues on sibling repos, fetch issues from sibling repos to inline current state into briefs, and send live messages to Culture mesh channels. Use when the next step lives outside agentfront (a brief for a sibling-repo agent, a status ping for a Culture channel, or pulling an issue body + comments into context). Issue posts auto-sign with `- <nick> (Claude)` (agtag resolves `<nick>` from `culture.yaml`, falling back to repo basename); mesh messages are unsigned (the IRC nick is the speaker). Not for in-agentfront issues — use `gh issue create` or the `cicd` skill for those. Renamed from `coordinate` in steward 0.8.0; absorbed `gh-issues` in 0.9.1. Issue I/O is backed by `agtag` (>=0.1) starting in 0.11.0.
|
Communicate (Cross-Repo + Mesh)
agentfront participates in alignment across the AgentCulture mesh; that
surfaces in four distinct channels:
- Tracked, async hand-offs — a gap in another repo (a missing public
API, a divergent skill, a documentation ask) where an agent on the
other side needs to act, and the ask should outlive the conversation.
→
post-issue.sh (GitHub).
- Follow-up on a tracked thread — a status update, an answer to a
question, or a "this is done" note on an issue that's already open.
→
post-comment.sh (GitHub).
- Inbound state read — pulling current issue body + comments from a
sibling repo so a brief or plan can inline what's there instead of
saying "see issue #N." →
fetch-issues.sh (GitHub).
- Ephemeral coordination — a status ping, a question, a "PR ready
for merge" notice on a Culture mesh channel where the audience is
already listening.
→
mesh-message.sh (Culture IRC).
All four live under one skill because they share the same audience
(sibling-repo agents) and the same red flag (don't double-post the same
ask across post + mesh — pick one).
Backed by agtag
The three GitHub verbs (post-issue.sh, post-comment.sh,
fetch-issues.sh) are thin wrappers around the agtag CLI
(agtag issue post|reply|fetch). agtag handles auto-signature
resolution from the local culture.yaml (falling back to repo
basename), JSON output mode, and a uniform exit-code policy. Read
agtag learn for the agent-facing self-teaching prompt and
agtag explain agtag / agtag explain issue for the surface docs —
this SKILL.md does not re-document agtag's flags.
mesh-message.sh stays a culture channel message wrapper for now;
agtag mesh transport is slated for v0.2.
When to Use
Issue mode (post-issue.sh)
- A gap surfaces in another repo's surface (missing public API,
wire-format compat fix, divergent skill, documentation ask).
- You're handing off a self-contained brief to a sibling-repo agent.
- You're asking a question that benefits from a tracked artifact rather
than ephemeral chat.
Broadcast mode (steward announce-skill-update)
agentfront is a downstream consumer of these vendored skills, not a
supplier — the broadcast verb lives in steward-cli and is what
delivered issues #17 and #18 to this repo in the first place. Don't
invoke steward announce-skill-update from here. The relevant
upstream behavior, kept for reference:
- A supplier bumps a skill in its own
.claude/skills/<name>/ and the
change is more than identifier-only or doc-only.
- The
steward announce-skill-update verb (in steward-cli) renders
the canonical six-section brief and pipes it through its own
post-issue.sh per consumer. agentfront is on the receiving end.
Mesh mode (mesh-message.sh)
- You want to ping a Culture channel with a status update ("PR #N ready
for merge", "starting nightly corpus scan").
- You're asking a question where you expect a fast reply from whoever
is listening on the channel right now.
- You're announcing a decision that doesn't need a tracked artifact.
Comment mode (post-comment.sh)
- An open issue needs a follow-up — a status update, an answer to a
maintainer's question, a "this is shipped" note pointing at a PR.
- You're closing the loop on an
agtag issue post you sent earlier and
the resolution belongs on the same thread (audit trail beats a
separate ping).
- Auto-signed by agtag; do not hand-author the trailing nick.
Fetch mode (fetch-issues.sh)
- You're about to write a brief and want to inline the current state of
one or more sibling-repo issues (body + comments) instead of saying
"see issue #N."
- You're triaging a list of cross-repo issues and want their bodies and
comments in one shot for context.
- Avoids the
gh issue view "Projects (classic) deprecated" error by
passing --json explicitly to GitHub.
When NOT to Use
- In-agentfront issues — open them with
gh issue create directly, or
work them through the cicd skill.
- PR review comments — that's the
cicd skill (which already
auto-signs replies).
- Routine commits — those don't get cross-repo signatures.
- Long-form asks on the mesh — anything that needs acceptance
criteria belongs in an issue, not a channel message.
Conventions
1. Briefs are self-contained
The receiving agent must not need agentfront-side context to act. Inline
the relevant content; do not say "see agentfront's plan."
A brief that says "see agentfront#NN" is a bug. The receiving agent will
look at it, get lost in agentfront-specific context that's irrelevant to
them, and either ask for clarification (slow round-trip) or guess wrong
(worse). Inline the ask, the rationale, and concrete acceptance
criteria. Quote source-of-truth files (path + line numbers + small
excerpts) when their shape matters to the ask.
2. Per-channel signature rules
| Channel | Signature | Why |
|---|
| GitHub issues / comments | - <nick> (Claude) — agtag resolves <nick> from the local culture.yaml, falling back to repo basename | Cross-repo audit trail — readers can tell at a glance which sibling and that it came from an AI. |
| Culture mesh | none — unsigned | The IRC nick already identifies the speaker. A trailing - <nick> (Claude) would be visual noise that the nick already supplies. |
Vendors do not need to edit a literal — agtag does the resolution.
--as NICK overrides if a vendor needs to sign as something other than
its culture.yaml suffix. Mesh messages stay unsigned across all
vendors.
3. Issue title format
<verb> <thing> (unblocks <consumer>) — e.g.,
Vendor portability-lint into <repo> (unblocks agentfront rubric check).
The parenthetical tells the receiving repo's maintainers what's waiting
on them. Drop the parenthetical only when the ask isn't blocking
anything.
How to Invoke
File a new issue
bash .claude/skills/communicate/scripts/post-issue.sh \
--repo agentculture/<sibling> \
--title "Vendor portability-lint into <sibling> (unblocks agentfront rubric)" \
--body-file /tmp/brief.md
Or pass the body on stdin:
bash .claude/skills/communicate/scripts/post-issue.sh \
--repo agentculture/<sibling> \
--title "..." <<'EOF'
<brief body here, multi-paragraph, with all the inline context the receiving agent needs>
EOF
The script prints the issue URL on success — capture it for
cross-references in your spec / plan / PR description. agtag appends
the signature - <nick> (Claude) (resolved from culture.yaml).
Broadcast a skill update to known consumers
This is steward's role specifically — the verb lives in steward-cli,
not in this skill's scripts/. Downstream vendors of communicate
(agentfront, cfafi, culture, auntiepypi, …) do not get a broadcast wrapper
because they don't broadcast — they only use the primitives above
(post-issue.sh, fetch-issues.sh, mesh-message.sh). The block
below is reference for what landed in this repo via #17 / #18:
steward announce-skill-update --skill cicd --since 0.6.0
steward announce-skill-update --skill cicd \
--to agentculture/auntiepypi --to agentculture/cfafi
steward announce-skill-update --skill cicd \
--to agentculture/auntiepypi --dry-run
steward announce-skill-update --skill cicd --list
--since VERSION controls which CHANGELOG entries get inlined (every
entry from the top down to but not including the cutoff version).
Without it, the verb keyword-filters CHANGELOG entries to those
mentioning the skill name. --note-file PATH appends free-text under
the upstream script list for skill-specific gotchas the generic
template can't anticipate (e.g. "this skill's post-issue.sh
hard-codes a signature literal — your vendor must change it"). The
brief is rendered once and reused across consumers; per-consumer
failures stream to stderr and the verb exits 1 if any failed. The
template lives at
scripts/templates/skill-update-brief.md so future supplier-role
repos can render their own briefs from the same shape.
Fast recipe — "brief sibling-repo Z on skill X"
This shape of ask is a recipe, not a planning question. Skip plan
mode. The call site:
steward announce-skill-update \
--skill <name> --to <owner>/<repo> \
--since <last-stable-version> \
[--note-file /tmp/note.md] --dry-run
Eyeball the rendered brief; drop --dry-run to post. The verb
prints the issue URL on success and exits non-zero on failure —
that is the verification. Don't write parallel gh issue list /
gh issue view checks unless the verb itself is what you're
testing. --to overrides the ledger, so non-ledger consumers
don't require a ledger edit first; they enter the ledger later
when they confirm their vendored shape.
Comment on an existing issue
bash .claude/skills/communicate/scripts/post-comment.sh \
--repo agentculture/<sibling> \
--number 42 \
--body-file /tmp/follow-up.md
Or pipe the body in:
bash .claude/skills/communicate/scripts/post-comment.sh \
--repo agentculture/<sibling> \
--number 42 <<'EOF'
PR
EOF
Auto-signed by agtag from culture.yaml; do not hand-author the
trailing nick.
Send a mesh channel message
bash .claude/skills/communicate/scripts/mesh-message.sh \
--channel "#general" \
--body "PR #42 — all review threads addressed. Ready for merge."
Body can also come from --body-file PATH or stdin. The script wraps
culture channel message <target> <text> and forwards exit codes
unchanged, so failures (no Culture server, agent not connected) surface
verbatim. No signature is appended — the IRC nick is the speaker.
Fetch sibling-repo issues
bash .claude/skills/communicate/scripts/fetch-issues.sh 191 --repo agentculture/culture
bash .claude/skills/communicate/scripts/fetch-issues.sh 191-197 --repo agentculture/culture
bash .claude/skills/communicate/scripts/fetch-issues.sh 191 195 197
Output is one JSON object per issue (separated by header bars) with
number, title, state, labels, body, and comments. Without
--repo, gh resolves the repo from the current git remote. Failures
on a single issue print ERROR: Could not fetch issue #N and continue
with the next one.
agentfront is not a registered mesh agent today (see the cicd SKILL.md
note). The script works once agentfront has been registered and started
via culture agent register + culture start spark-agentfront; until
then, calling it will fail with whatever error the Culture CLI returns,
which is the right behavior — fix the registration, don't paper over it.
Scripts
| Script | Purpose |
|---|
scripts/post-issue.sh | Create a new issue on a target repo. Wraps agtag issue post; auto-signs from culture.yaml. |
scripts/post-comment.sh | Comment on an existing issue. Wraps agtag issue reply; auto-signs from culture.yaml. |
scripts/fetch-issues.sh | Fetch one or more issues (single / range / list) with body + comments. Wraps agtag issue fetch. |
scripts/mesh-message.sh | Send a message to a Culture mesh channel. Unsigned (IRC nick is the speaker). |
scripts/templates/skill-update-brief.md | The Markdown template consumed by steward announce-skill-update (the broadcast verb lives in steward-cli, not in this skill). Six fixed sections; placeholder syntax {{NAME}}. |
More scripts can land here as the communication footprint grows —
mesh-ask.sh for question-shaped pings via culture channel ask,
agtag-mesh wrappers once agtag message ships in v0.2, etc. Add them
when there's a second concrete need; do not pre-build for
hypotheticals.
Red Flags
Never:
- Post a brief that says "see agentfront's plan" without inlining the
content. Briefs must be self-contained.
- Skip the issue signature. The script enforces it; do not introduce a
--no-signature flag.
- Sign mesh messages with
- <nick> (Claude). The nick already says
who you are.
- Use this skill for in-agentfront issues — use
gh issue create or the
cicd skill instead.
- Manually type
- <nick> (Claude) at the end of an issue or comment
body — agtag appends it. Manual typing creates double-signatures.
- Post the same ask twice across channels (issue + mesh). Pick one.
Tracked → issue. Ephemeral → mesh.
- Use mesh mode for anything that needs acceptance criteria. If the
receiving agent has to decide "did I do this right?", you owe them
an issue.
