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Agent skill

Gentle AI

by Gentleman-Programming in Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell

Use Gentle AI harness discipline for Pi work: clarify first, track ODD work, use applicable test-first development by default, delegate when useful, and protect review workload.

MITAuto-check passedTesting & QA

Install Gentle AI

skills CLI
$ npx skills add Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell --skill gentle-ai -a claude-code

Project install by default; add -g for ~/.claude/skills/.

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell gentle-ai --agent claude-code

Project scope by default; add --scope user for a personal install. Needs GitHub CLI 2.90.0 or later (public preview).

Manual copy
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell.git skills-src && mkdir -p .claude/skills && cp -r skills-src/skills/gentle-ai .claude/skills/gentle-ai && rm -rf skills-src

Use ~/.claude/skills/ instead of .claude/skills for a personal install. The folder must contain SKILL.md.

Claude Code skills documentation · loads skills from .claude/skills/

Facts

Skill name
gentle-ai
GitHub stars
1.2k
Token cost
~1.2k tokens
SKILL.md length
589 words
Files
1
Skills in repo
12
Repo updated
First seen
Licence
MIT

At a glance

Use Gentle AI harness discipline for Pi work: clarify first, track ODD work, use applicable test-first development by default, delegate when useful, and protect review workload.

  • Tasks that involve Test-driven development
  • SKILL.md covers Identity Rule, Compact Rules, Work Routing and Review Lens Selection, plus 1 more section
  • Calls git

What it does

Gentle AI is an agent skill from Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell. Use Gentle AI harness discipline for Pi work: clarify first, track ODD work, use applicable test-first development by default, delegate when useful, and protect review workload.

Its SKILL.md is about 1.2k tokens, which your agent loads only when the skill is triggered. It is a single SKILL.md file with no bundled scripts.

It sits in Testing & QA, covering Test-driven development. The repository describes itself as: Gentle Shell is a Pi-native coding-agent harness for controlled development with Organic Driven Development, optional SDD/OpenSpec, subagents, TDD evidence, review guardrails… The licence is MIT.

When your agent uses it

  • Tasks that involve Test-driven development

Example prompts

  • “/gentle-ai”

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 42653f7. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

  • Tool permissions

    Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

    From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

  • Runs code

    Shell commands in SKILL.md call:

    • git

    From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

  • Network

    No URLs in SKILL.md. Its commands use git, which can reach the network depending on how they are called.

    From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

  • Credentials

    Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

    From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Gentle AI loads about 1.2k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 47 tokens; SKILL.md has 589 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~47
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~1.2k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Auto-check passed

The automated check found no risky patterns in SKILL.md.

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell at commit 42653f7, republished under its MIT licence (© Gentleman-Programming). 589 words, ~1,204 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/gentle-ai/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder).
name
gentle-ai
description
Use Gentle AI harness discipline for Pi work: clarify first, track ODD work, use applicable test-first development by default, delegate when useful, and protect review workload.

el Gentleman Harness

Use this skill for non-trivial, risky, or multi-step ODD work.

Identity Rule

When asked who or what you are, answer as el Gentleman: a Pi-specific coding-agent harness with senior architect persona, ODD by default, and subagent coordination. Do not answer as a generic assistant.

Compact Rules

  • Clarify scope, constraints, acceptance criteria, and non-goals before implementation.
  • Size every task by the orchestrator's Task Size section: understood, contained risk, and resumable from the original request plus git diff. Counts of files, commands, tests, or fixes never decide it. Track only large work in its task document and mirror.
  • For behavior changes with applicable runnable deterministic tests and a clear expected outcome, use test-first by default: observe RED, GREEN, relevant alternate cases, then REFACTOR and record evidence. Test presence alone does not establish applicability. For passive documentation, non-testable changes, an unavailable runner, or no meaningful RED, state why and run proportionate ordinary functional or structural verification. Never invent RED/GREEN, skip checks, or require a chat/TUI toggle.
  • Keep one parent session responsible for orchestration; child subagents should receive concrete phase work and must not spawn more subagents.
  • Parent-only delegation triggers fire one mechanism at a time: an open decision (ask), understanding beyond the evidence budget (explore), high risk (independent verifier), a large task (track), a writer reason (parallel units or context), tooling/worktree incidents, or a parent context past the context backstop.
  • Parallel writers only with disjoint Allowed edit surfaces (runtime-enforced) or isolated worktrees.
  • Forecast review workload before large changes; ask before producing oversized or multi-area diffs.
  • Keep dangerous-command safety independent and authoritative.
  • Never claim persistent memory is available because of el Gentleman itself; memory is provided by separate packages/tools when active.
  • For skill-shaped requests, check the registry/filesystem for a more specific skill before generic execution; use it only if it improves the immediate task without adding ceremony.
  • If a clearly expected skill is missing, say the fallback explicitly instead of silently using generic subagents.
Show full SKILL.md (266 more words)Show less

Work Routing

Use the smallest safe harness:

text
small task                 → inline direct, focused test and suite inline
understanding is missing   → explore, then re-evaluate
large authorized work      → track ODD tasks and implement by work unit

For large implementation with subagents:

text
clarify → scout/context-builder when context-heavy → inline, or a writer only for a reason → verify

Hard delegation triggers:

  • Evidence-budget rule: read inline only when the evidence fits one parallel batch of at most 3 calls, ~10k tokens (grep and line ranges, never whole large files). When understanding needs more reading or more than ~5 sequential lookups, delegate one explorer that returns a handoff of at most ~2k tokens with path:line evidence. Never force delegation for a small targeted question; do not re-read what the handoff covered beyond one spot check.
  • Writer rule: a writer only for a reason (parallel units launched together, or context); size and file count never fire it.
  • Verification rule: a high-risk change gets an independent verifier; otherwise the change's own focused test and suite run inline.
  • Incident rule: after wrong cwd, accidental worktree/repo mutation, merge recovery, confusing test command, or environment workaround, diagnose separately.
  • Context backstop: when the parent context passes ~150k tokens, pause and delegate the next bounded unit of work to a non-review subagent. Keep command output bounded (counts, --stat, tail).

Review Lens Selection

review-risk, review-reliability, review-resilience, and review-readability are Gentle AI review-lens vocabulary. This injected skill does not select, invoke, sequence, or retry those lenses; any applicable runtime uses only its dynamically supplied instructions.

Gentle AI RDD Ownership

Gentle AI dynamically supplies runtime-specific RDD instructions at runtime. Treat them as the sole lifecycle authority. This skill never defines a review route, command sequence, state machine, approval or gate policy, recovery path, or fallback; when no native instruction is available, follow ordinary repository policy without inventing one.

Dangerous-command safety remains independent and authoritative.

© Gentleman-Programming, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

Just SKILL.md in skills/gentle-ai of Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell.

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 42653f7

Compare with similar skills

Gentle AI next to the 5 skills that share the most tags, products or categories with it. Stars are the repository's; “used in” counts other GitHub owners with a copy.

Gentle AI compared with similar skills
SkillStarsUsed inTokensAuto-checkLicenceRepo updated
Gentle AI this skillGentleman-Programming/gentle-shell1.2k—~1.2kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Nv Implementnovuhq/novu40k—~1.7kAutomated safety check: PassCustom licence
Tapd Story ImplementTencentBlueKing/bk-bcs841—~1.2kAutomated safety check: PassCustom licence
Implementopen-octo/octo-agent125—~2.3kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Rust TDD Workflowrtk-ai/rtk83k—~753Automated safety check: NotesApache-2.0
RTK Filter TDD in Rustrtk-ai/rtk83k—~1.9kAutomated safety check: NotesApache-2.0

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More from Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell

All 12 skills in this repo

  • Gentle AI Issue Creation

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    Create and triage GitHub issues from repository evidence. An agent skill from Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell.

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  • Gentle AI Judgment Day

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    Trigger: judgment day, judgement day, dual review, adversarial review, juzgar.

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.4k tokensUpdated today
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  • Gentle AI Branch and PR

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    Prepares branches and pull requests for the Gentle AI repository, checking for a linked approved issue, labels, size budget and required checks.

    1.2k GitHub stars~2.2k tokensUpdated today
    Auto-check passed

  • Gentle AI Cognitive Doc Design

    Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell

    Design docs that reduce cognitive load. An agent skill from Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell.

    1.2k GitHub stars~597 tokensUpdated today
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  • Gentle AI Comment Writer

    Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell

    Write warm, direct collaboration comments. An agent skill from Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell.

    1.2k GitHub stars~623 tokensUpdated today
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  • Gentle AI Skill Creator

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    Trigger: /skill-creation, skill creation, skill creator, create skill, new skill.

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Categories

Questions about Gentle AI

What does Gentle AI do?

Use Gentle AI harness discipline for Pi work: clarify first, track ODD work, use applicable test-first development by default, delegate when useful, and protect review workload. Gentle AI is an agent skill from Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell. Use Gentle AI harness discipline for Pi work: clarify first, track ODD work, use applicable test-first development by default, delegate when useful, and protect review workload.

When should I use Gentle AI?

Gentle AI fits situations like: tasks that involve Test-driven development.

How do I install Gentle AI in Claude Code?

Run `npx skills add Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell --skill gentle-ai -a claude-code`. Or copy the skill folder (skills/gentle-ai in Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell) into .claude/skills/gentle-ai in your project. Claude Code loads it when a task matches its description.

How do I install Gentle AI in Codex?

Run `npx skills add Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell --skill gentle-ai -a codex`. Or copy the skill folder (skills/gentle-ai in Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell) into .agents/skills/gentle-ai in your project. Codex loads it when a task matches its description.

Can I use Gentle AI in Cursor, Gemini CLI or GitHub Copilot?

Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode also load SKILL.md folders. With the skills CLI, run `npx skills add Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell --skill gentle-ai -a cursor` (or -a gemini-cli, github-copilot or opencode for the others). To copy it by hand, put the folder in .cursor/skills/gentle-ai, .gemini/skills/gentle-ai, .github/skills/gentle-ai and .opencode/skills/gentle-ai in your project.

What does Gentle AI need to run?

Going by SKILL.md and its folder, Gentle AI needs the command-line tools its instructions call (git).

Does Gentle AI access the network?

SKILL.md contains no URLs. Its commands use git, which can reach the network depending on how they are called. This is read from the text; nothing was executed.

Is Gentle AI safe to install?

Our automated static check of SKILL.md found no risky patterns, such as piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files or hidden Unicode. It is not a guarantee. Review the folder before installing.

What licence does Gentle AI use?

Gentle AI is published under the MIT licence (the repository's licence). It allows redistribution, so the full SKILL.md is shown on this page.

How many tokens does Gentle AI use?

About 1.2k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 4.8k characters). Agents keep only the skill's name and description in context until a task matches; then they load SKILL.md in full.

What are the alternatives to Gentle AI?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with Gentle AI: Nv Implement (novuhq/novu, 40k stars), Tapd Story Implement (TencentBlueKing/bk-bcs, 841 stars), Implement (open-octo/octo-agent, 125 stars) and Rust TDD Workflow (rtk-ai/rtk, 83k stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains Gentle AI?

Gentleman-Programming (a GitHub organization) maintains it in Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell, which has 1,245 GitHub stars. The repository holds 12 skills in this directory. The repository was last updated on October 9, 2026.

Source: Gentleman-Programming/gentle-shell on GitHub. Facts on this page come from the repository at the commit we read; the author's words are quoted as theirs.