manage

name

manage

description

Use this skill when doing manage-level (non-mission) ACED work — inspecting or maintaining the agent-config tooling ACED evaluates, such as "set up the per-model runner agents", "list the model runners", "list the installed skills", or "validate/repair the repo-private skills". Routes to the matching engine; it does not author a config (define-agent / define-skill) or change what ACED specifies (start-mission).

manage

The manage-level front door to ACED — the user-facing handler for non-mission work on the agent-config tooling corpus. Where define-agent / define-skill author a config and run / add-scenario score one, manage does the work that is neither: inspect and maintain the tooling ACED evaluates.

manage is a thin dispatcher: it classifies a manage request and loads the matching engine in the current session, holding no production logic, loading no governance, and writing no contract state. It opens no CR, invokes no gate, and performs no behavior change itself.

Manage picks no model. The model + effort a piece of work needs is set by the engine you load. The loaded engine advises; the user switches manually. (manage cannot switch the session model itself.)

Intake

• Fast path — skip the menu. When the invocation already names the operation — "set up the model runners", "list the runners", "remove the haiku runner" — load the matching engine directly, no menu.
• Menu — bare invocation. When manage is invoked with no operation named, do not guess. Ask via AskUserQuestion, presenting at most four options (the tool rejects more than four) and never truncating silently. The route groups today (Config runners, Skill corpus) fit the four-option rule; as more manage-level engines land, group the menu so a bare invocation still resolves within it.

The routing table — request → engine

Classification routes a manage request to the engine that handles it. The table grows as more manage-level ACED engines land:

Group	Request	Engine (handler)
Config runners	set up / list / remove per-model runner agents used to benchmark skills	manage-model-runners — internal, non-invokable; loaded here
Skill corpus	list / inventory the installed skills across the repo, the user-global install, and the shipped package	list-skills — internal, non-invokable; loaded here
Skill corpus	validate / repair repo-private skill metadata under .agents/skills	repair-private-skills — internal, non-invokable; loaded here
Skill corpus	list / add / remove / preview the extra skill-scan locations the validate engine uses	manage-skill-dirs — internal, non-invokable; loaded here

Load the engine in-session

When the route resolves, load the matched engine in the current session and run it directly — spawn nothing. Write-capable operations stay owned by their engine: manage-model-runners writes its runner agent-def files and their symlinks; repair-private-skills writes only under .agents/skills; manage-skill-dirs writes only .agents/aced/skill-dirs.toml; list-skills is read-only. manage only routes.

Non-mission — the boundary

manage maintains and inspects the ACED tooling corpus; it never changes what ACED specifies.

• Opens no CR, invokes no gate, writes no status / approval. Those belong to start-mission and the internal gates.
• Authoring is not manage. A request to create or improve an agent definition or a workflow skill is redirected to define-agent / define-skill, not handled here.
• Scoring is not manage. A request to run or score a config's eval suite defers to the eval-run skills (run / compare / report).
• A change to what ACED specifies — adding or revising ACED's own behavior — is redirected to start-mission, which opens a CR and runs the mission loop.
• Thin classifier. Classifying loads no governance and holds no production logic — it only loads the matched engine.