compile

name

compile

description

Compile an Anthropic-style skill — a directory with a SKILL.md and optional references/ — into a deterministic, runnable workflow via the rote CLI. Use when the user says "compile this skill", "graduate this skill" (the retired name for the same operation), "make this skill deterministic", "make this skill faster/cheaper", "turn this skill into a workflow", "turn this skill into code", "harden this skill for production", or complains that a skill is slow, expensive, or unreliable as a background job. Output: a pipeline.yaml IR, extracted code modules, typed LLM-judge signatures, and runtime code for Temporal, Cloudflare Workflows, or DBOS.

Compile a skill

You orchestrate the rote CLI. It runs an LLM compiler agent over a source skill and emits a deterministic pipeline. Your job: resolve the inputs, run the CLI, then interpret the output for the user. You never classify nodes or write pipeline.yaml yourself — the CLI's agent does.

1. Identify the source skill

The source is a directory containing a SKILL.md (optionally a references/ folder). The user names it, or you infer it from context (a skill just discussed, a path in the conversation, .claude/skills/* or skills/* in the project).

Confirm the resolved absolute path with the user before running. Compilation costs real time and tokens; never guess-and-go. If the directory has no SKILL.md, stop and ask.

2. Pick a runtime target

Ask the user which runtime, with these tradeoffs (one line each):

Runtime	Choose when	Emits
dbos	No infra to run — durability lives in SQLite/Postgres, runs anywhere Python runs	Python
cloudflare	You want serverless, fully managed execution on Cloudflare Workers	TypeScript
temporal	You already operate (or want) a Temporal cluster	Python

If the user has no opinion and no existing infra, use dbos — it is the CLI's default and the only target with zero standing infrastructure (you can omit --runtime entirely in that case).

3. Resolve the CLI (uv)

The CLI ships on PyPI as the rote-cli package and is run via uvx — no virtualenv, no pip, nothing to install beyond uv itself. The package's executable is named rote, so every invocation is uvx --from rote-cli rote <args>. Do not run uvx rote-cli ... — uvx looks for an executable named after the package and the published wheel doesn't ship one.

1. Check uv: uv --version. If missing, tell the user to install it with one command, then re-check:

   curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
   

2. Confirm the CLI resolves:

   uvx --from rote-cli rote --version
   

3. Only if the user needs unreleased features (or PyPI is unreachable), substitute the GitHub source — same CLI, different origin:

   uvx --from git+https://github.com/trevhud/rote rote --version
   

Do not clone the repo or build a venv; uvx handles isolation.

4. Run the compilation

uvx --from rote-cli rote compile <skill-dir> --runtime <runtime> --out <out-dir>

Pick an out-dir the user will find, e.g. ./compiled/<skill-name> next to the source skill. Ensure it does not clobber existing work.

Set expectations before launching — this is not a quick command:

• It spawns claude -p as a subprocess. The driver deliberately scrubs ANTHROPIC_API_KEY / ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN from the child environment so the run bills against the user's Claude subscription, not per-token API charges. Do not "fix" auth by exporting an API key; if the user explicitly wants API billing, pass --agent api instead.
• A realistic skill takes ~13 minutes wall clock and 30-40 agent turns (Sonnet, ~$0.70 on subscription). Small skills are faster.
• Therefore run it in the background and tell the user you did. Poll the process and check in rather than blocking the session.

If the run exits nonzero, check whether <out-dir>/compiled/pipeline.yaml exists anyway — the CLI recovers completed work from transient subprocess failures and says so in its output. Surface stderr to the user either way.

5. Report the result

Read <out-dir>/compiled/pipeline.yaml and <out-dir>/compiled/compile-report.md, then summarize:

1. Node-kind table — count nodes per kind and what each kind means here:

   Kind	Count	Meaning
   pure_function	n	deterministic code, LLM removed
   external_call	n	direct API call with retry/timeout
   llm_judge	n	typed LLM signature (kept, but bounded)
   agent_loop	n	still agentic (genuinely exploratory)
   hitl_gate	n	durable human approval point

2. Codified fraction — nodes that no longer need an LLM, mandatory nodes, and what each HITL gate blocks on.

3. Where things landed — <out-dir>/compiled/ (IR, extracted/, signatures/, report) and <out-dir>/runtime/<runtime>/ (the deployable code).

4. Next steps — the extracted/* modules are scaffolds that raise NotImplementedError; the user fills in real API client code, then deploys the runtime output. Once deployed, rote register + rote serve expose the pipeline as an MCP tool so Claude can trigger runs — the serve skill in this plugin walks through that.