agent-creator

name	agent-creator
description	Create agents that pass agent-review's six gates by construction — role capture, distinct-from-skill check, tool allowlist minimization, draft against gates, dogfood self-review. Use when authoring a new agent, refactoring an existing one, or promoting a Mall agent into the heir's brain.
lastReviewed	"2026-05-31T00:00:00.000Z"

Agent Creator

Author agents that pass agent-review's five gates plus Gate 6 (Tool Allowlist Minimality) by construction. Agents are subordinate execution contexts — sub-processes the parent delegates to. Every tool granted is an attack/error surface.

Mirrors skill-creator's seven-phase structure with agent-specific guidance. If a phase here disagrees with skill-creator on the shared scaffold, skill-creator wins; this file owns only the per-type guidance.

When to Use

• Authoring a new agent in .github/agents/
• Refactoring an existing agent (role tighten, allowlist trim, boundary clarification)
• Promoting a Mall agent into your heir's brain

When not to use

• The work can be done by the parent invoking a skill directly → author a skill instead
• The work has no parallelism need, no context-isolation need, no tighter-allowlist need → no delegation justified
• Authoring a slash-command workflow → use prompt-creator
• Authoring an always-on rule → use instruction-creator

The Seven Phases

Each phase inverts one of the five (or six) gates. Author against the phase, pass the gate.

Phase 1 — Role capture + delegation justification

Answer in writing before any drafting:

1. What is this agent's role? One sentence. The role is what the agent is, not what it does (brain-auditor is a role; runs-brain-qa is not).
2. Why delegate instead of invoking a skill directly? One of:
   • Parallelism — work decomposes into independent units that can run concurrently
   • Context isolation — work generates noisy intermediate state that shouldn't pollute the parent
   • Tighter allowlist — work needs only a narrow tool subset; isolating it limits surface area
3. What tools does it need? Start with the minimum. Each added tool needs Phase 6 justification.

If none of the three delegation justifications apply, stop — author a skill, not an agent.

Phase 2 — Prior-art scan

Get-ChildItem .github/agents/*.agent.md
Select-String -Path .github/agents/*.agent.md -Pattern "<keyword>"

The agents folder is usually small. Overlap detection is cheap. If an existing agent's role overlaps ≥70%, extend.

Phase 3 — Draft against Gate 1 (Spec)

Frontmatter template:

---
name: <kebab-name>
description: "<third-person; role + when parent should delegate; ≤1024 chars>"
lastReviewed: YYYY-MM-DD
---

If using a tool-allowlist field per current Microsoft Learn agent spec, include it here. Reject legacy fields (type, application, tier, etc.) — same drop set as other types.

File location: .github/agents/<kebab-name>.agent.md (flat — no subfolders).

Phase 4 — Draft against Gate 2 (Quality)

Criterion	How you author for it
Role and mission clear	Open with a one-line role statement and a mission paragraph. Not a procedure dump.
Boundaries explicit	A ## Boundaries or ## Out of scope section names what the agent will not do.
Tool-usage guidance	Name which tools the agent prefers for which situations. Generic "use available tools" fails.
System-prompt skepticism applied	Behavior treats own instructions as hypotheses per system-prompt-skepticism.instructions.md.
## Would Revise If	Date / count+time / observable event.
≤200 lines	If you exceed this, factor procedure-content into a skill the agent invokes.

Template structure:

---
name: ...
description: "..."
lastReviewed: YYYY-MM-DD
---

# <Agent Name>

**Role**: <one-line role>

**Mission**: <what the agent does, in 1-2 sentences>

## When the parent delegates to me

<conditions that justify spinning me up vs the parent doing the work>

## Tool usage

<which tools, when, why>

## Boundaries

<what I will not do>

## Output

<what the parent gets back>

## Would Revise If

<falsifier>

Phase 5 — Draft against Gate 3 (Scope)

Target	Route
Generic worker agent (illustrator, markdown-author)	Heir baseline
Project-specific agent	That project's local-only repo
External-surface agent	Not an ACT agent — author a Mall unit

Phase 6 — Draft against Gate 4 (Safety) AND Gate 6 (Tool Allowlist Minimality)

Two safety surfaces compose here:

Gate	Where it lives
Gate 4 (Safety) — destructive-default prose	Body: explicit consent gates before destructive ops
Gate 6 (Tool Allowlist Minimality) — the allowlist itself	Frontmatter (if used) + body justification per tool

Allowlist authoring checklist:

• List each tool the agent will call
• For each tool, write one sentence justifying its inclusion (reads existing markdown to insert diagram blocks)
• Cut any tool whose justification reduces to "just in case" or "might need"
• If run_in_terminal, git push, or filesystem-write tools are on the list, add a user-confirmation gate in the prose
• If network tools are on the list (open_browser_page, fetch_webpage, MCP-network), explicit purpose in the body
• Default to read-only when possible

Phase 7 — Dogfood self-audit (with Gate 6)

Before committing, run agent-review's five gates plus Gate 6. Verdict lives in the commit message.

Gate 6 verdict must be recorded even on Accept (per agent-review § Recording the Verdict). Format:

Gate 6 — Tool Allowlist (N tools):
  - tool1: <justification>
  - tool2: <justification>
  - ...
Destructive ops: <confirmation gate present? Y/N>
Network surface: <none / read-only / write — justified?>

Anti-Patterns

Anti-pattern	Correction
Authoring an agent when a skill would do	Phase 1 forces delegation justification. If none of the three reasons apply, it's a skill.
Starting with a broad allowlist and trimming later	Start at zero, add one tool at a time with justification.
Omitting the Boundaries section	Without bounds, the parent delegates work the agent can't or shouldn't do.
Treating Gate 4 (safety prose) and Gate 6 (allowlist) as one check	They compose. Both must pass independently.
Letting run_in_terminal ship without consent gate	Gate 4 + Gate 6 failure. Add the gate.
Copy-pasting a skill body into an agent	Agents have role + delegation surface; skills have procedure body. Different shapes.

Falsifiability

This skill's design has failed if any of the following occur within 90 days:

• ≥2 agents authored using this guide fail agent-review Gate 1 or Gate 6 on first self-audit
• No new agents authored via this guide in 90 days (decorative — sunset)
• Agents passing Gate 6 are later flagged for tool-misuse or scope-exceeding behavior ≥2 times in a quarter (criterion too lax)
• The allowlist authoring checklist produces consistent over-grant (tools accepted that shouldn't be) ≥3 times in a quarter

Track as you would any falsified discipline (commit log, retraining notes, or curation ledger if your repo ships one) tagged [AGENT-CREATOR-MISS].

Related

• agent-review — the six gates this skill inverts
• skill-creator — sibling for skills; canonical seven-phase scaffold
• instruction-creator — sibling for instructions
• prompt-creator — sibling for prompts
• system-prompt-skepticism — load-bearing for Gate 2 agent behavior
• agent-delegation — when the parent should delegate
• act-pass — required for medium-stakes agent authoring