communicate

name	communicate
type	command
description	Cross-repo + mesh communication from culture-nodes: 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 culture-nodes (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 `- culture-nodes (Claude)`; mesh messages are unsigned (the IRC nick is the speaker). Not for in-culture-nodes 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)

Steward's job is 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.
• (steward-specific — supplier role.) You're onboarding a sibling to the stack — "set it up", "align it", "update it with our stack", "set up the pipelines". The deliverable is an issue with a self-contained brief, never files written into that repo. In steward, quote steward's docs/sibling-pattern.md (required artifacts) and docs/skill-sources.md (the skill set to vendor) into the brief so it stands alone; steward's CLAUDE.md "Steward's lane" section is the canonical statement. Downstream vendors of this skill don't onboard siblings — those steward-side docs don't exist in your repo, so skip this bullet.
• You're asking a question that benefits from a tracked artifact rather than ephemeral chat.

Broadcast mode (steward announce-skill-update)

• You bumped a skill in .claude/skills/<name>/ and the change is more than identifier-only or doc-only — downstream consumers will benefit from re-vendoring.
• Don't hand-author the brief — the steward announce-skill-update verb (steward-cli) renders the canonical six-section form (what's stale, cite locations, what's in upstream now, recipe, acceptance criteria, references) from the live state of .claude/skills/<name>/scripts/, the CHANGELOG.md, and docs/skill-sources.md's downstream column. Then it pipes through this skill's post-issue.sh per consumer (so the auto-signature stays consistent with hand-authored briefs).

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-steward 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 steward-side context to act. Inline the relevant content; do not say "see steward's plan."

A brief that says "see steward#NN" is a bug. The receiving agent will look at it, get lost in steward-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 steward 0.7 doctor --apply). 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

Paths in the examples are relative to this skill's base directory (the scripts/ alongside this SKILL.md); agtag (>=0.1) and gh must be on PATH.

File a new issue

bash scripts/post-issue.sh \
    --repo agentculture/<sibling> \
    --title "Vendor portability-lint into <sibling> (unblocks steward 0.7)" \
    --body-file /tmp/brief.md

Or pass the body on stdin:

bash 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 (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).

# Default: read consumers from docs/skill-sources.md "Downstream copies"
# cell for <skill>; render the six-section brief; pipe to post-issue.sh
# for each consumer.
steward announce-skill-update --skill cicd --since 0.6.0

# Override the consumer list (skips the ledger lookup entirely):
steward announce-skill-update --skill cicd \
    --to agentculture/auntiepypi --to agentculture/cfafi

# Preview without posting:
steward announce-skill-update --skill cicd \
    --to agentculture/auntiepypi --dry-run

# Just print the consumer list (for ledger sanity-checks):
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 scripts/post-comment.sh \
    --repo agentculture/<sibling> \
    --number 42 \
    --body-file /tmp/follow-up.md

Or pipe the body in:

bash scripts/post-comment.sh \
    --repo agentculture/<sibling> \
    --number 42 <<'EOF'
PR #87 has shipped — closing the loop on this thread.
EOF

Auto-signed by agtag from culture.yaml; do not hand-author the trailing nick.

Send a mesh channel message

bash 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 scripts/fetch-issues.sh 191 --repo agentculture/culture
bash scripts/fetch-issues.sh 191-197 --repo agentculture/culture
bash 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.

Steward is not a registered mesh agent today (see the cicd SKILL.md note). The script works once steward has been registered and started via culture agent register + culture start spark-steward; 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:

• Scaffold or write files into the target repo when the ask is an issue on it. Handing off / onboarding is an issue, not an edit — a direct "set them up" is still an instruction to file the brief. (In steward this is the "Steward's lane" rule; the principle holds for any vendor of this skill.)
• Post a brief that says "see steward'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-steward 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.