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Agent skill

Watchdog

by mvschwarz in mvschwarz/openrig

A skill your agent uses when configuring rig watchdog policies, authoring wake/refocus/alignment-checkpoint messages, or choosing the right intervention level for a stale-owner situation.

Apache-2.0Auto-check passedAgent Workflows

Install Watchdog

skills CLI
$ npx skills add mvschwarz/openrig --skill watchdog -a claude-code

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

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install mvschwarz/openrig watchdog --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/mvschwarz/openrig.git skills-src && mkdir -p .claude/skills && cp -r skills-src/skills/_canonical/core/watchdog .claude/skills/watchdog && 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
watchdog
GitHub stars
6.2k
Token cost
~1.5k tokens
SKILL.md length
681 words
Files
1
Skills in repo
49
Repo updated
First seen
Licence
Apache-2.0

At a glance

A skill your agent uses when configuring rig watchdog policies, authoring wake/refocus/alignment-checkpoint messages, or choosing the right intervention level for a stale-owner situation.

  • Works in 7 steps: Cadence is too frequent and pollutes the… → Watchdog wakes the wrong seat instead of… → Refocus text is too rule-shaped and… → …
  • Configuring rig watchdog policies
  • SKILL.md covers Use this when, Don't use this when, The 3-level intervention stack and Current best practice for…, plus 5 more sections
  • Instructions only: no scripts, shell commands, URLs or credentials in SKILL.md

What it does

Watchdog is an agent skill from mvschwarz/openrig. Use when configuring rig watchdog policies, authoring wake/refocus/alignment-checkpoint messages, or choosing the right intervention level for a stale-owner situation. The 3-level continuity-check stack (wake / refocus / alignment-checkpoint), the discipline that prevents cadence pollution and bureaucracy theater, and the artifact-pool loop-edge pattern for evidence-aware waking.

Its SKILL.md is about 1.5k 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 Agent Workflows. The repository describes itself as: Build your own network of agents from Claude Code, Codex and Pi: persistent teams with roles, shared context and owned work. The licence is Apache-2.0.

When your agent uses it

  • Configuring rig watchdog policies
  • Authoring wake/refocus/alignment-checkpoint messages
  • Choosing the right intervention level for a stale-owner situation

Example prompts

  • “/watchdog”

Workflow steps

7 steps, taken from the first numbered list in SKILL.md.

  1. Cadence is too frequent and pollutes the workstream.
  2. Watchdog wakes the wrong seat instead of the stale owner.
  3. Refocus text is too rule-shaped and creates brittle behavior.
  4. Watchdog compensates for bad startup or workflow design instead of revealing it.
  5. Refocus is misread as a new top-priority task and interrupts the current action.
  6. Refocus becomes bureaucracy theater: an already-approved workflow stops for re-approval.
  7. Repeated static nudges teach agents to answer the reminder instead of progressing the artifact.

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit a29dfbc. 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

    No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md.

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

  • Network

    No URLs in SKILL.md.

    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

Watchdog loads about 1.5k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 98 tokens; SKILL.md has 681 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~98
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~1.5k

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 mvschwarz/openrig at commit a29dfbc, republished under its Apache-2.0 licence (© mvschwarz). 681 words, ~1,478 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/watchdog/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder).
name
watchdog
description
Use when configuring `rig watchdog` policies, authoring wake/refocus/alignment-checkpoint messages, or choosing the right intervention level for a stale-owner situation. The 3-level continuity-check stack (wake / refocus / alignment-checkpoint), the discipline that prevents cadence pollution and bureaucracy theater, and the artifact-pool loop-edge pattern for evidence-aware waking.

Watchdog

Continuity checks are timed or evidence-triggered interventions that keep an agent workflow from going idle, drifting, or entering needless bureaucracy. They operationalize the refocus doctrine.

Use this when

  • Authoring a watchdog policy for a long-running rig (artifact-pool edges, stale-owner detection, periodic reminders).
  • Choosing the intervention level for a stale-owner situation: is this a wake, a refocus, or an alignment checkpoint?
  • Drafting wake/refocus/alignment-checkpoint message text that prevents cadence pollution and bureaucracy theater.
  • Deciding cadence — scan vs wake intervals, conservative vs aggressive nudging.

Don't use this when

  • The agent is actively working and closing artifacts. Prefer no-op.
  • The intervention is masking bad startup or workflow design — fix the underlying cause, don't compensate via watchdog.
  • The work has a clear next-action handoff already in queue. Use queue nudges instead of a watchdog policy.

The 3-level intervention stack

LevelGoalWhenWhat it does
WakeRestart motionOwner appears idle, stale, blocked, or missing a next handoffSmall liveness nudge — does NOT reframe the work
RefocusCorrect driftOutput shows mode drift, approval regression, weak stop-condition reasoningMedium alignment nudge — re-centers on role, north star, current approved workstream, coordination mode, stop conditions; does NOT interrupt valid work
Alignment checkpointRebuild shared mapPhase boundary, lifecycle mutation, product-intent decision, confusing contradictionLarger deliberate pause — agent runs full refocus before proceeding

cron, timers, and rig watchdog are scheduling substrates. They should NOT imply that every tick means the same semantic action. The intervention level is chosen by evidence, not cadence.

Current best practice for refocus message text

A well-shaped refocus message:

  • Starts with: finish current action first.
  • Names the intervention kind: wake, refocus, or alignment checkpoint.
  • Names the current approved workstream or says none is known.
  • Says what continuity means: continue, verify, hand off, or explicitly park.
  • Names stop conditions: scope/risk/posture changes, failed gate, contradictory evidence, or no continuity chain naming a sensible next step.
  • Does NOT convert itself into a fresh approval gate.
  • Does NOT wake delivery seats unless an approved workflow exists and the owner is stale.

Failure modes (7; verbatim)

  1. Cadence is too frequent and pollutes the workstream.
  2. Watchdog wakes the wrong seat instead of the stale owner.
  3. Refocus text is too rule-shaped and creates brittle behavior.
  4. Watchdog compensates for bad startup or workflow design instead of revealing it.
  5. Refocus is misread as a new top-priority task and interrupts the current action.
  6. Refocus becomes bureaucracy theater: an already-approved workflow stops for re-approval.
  7. Repeated static nudges teach agents to answer the reminder instead of progressing the artifact.
Show full SKILL.md (260 more words)Show less

Artifact-pool loop edges (the first evidence-aware pattern)

The first evidence-aware watchdog use that should remain small and explicit:

  • Consumer-pool wake: if a ready artifact exists, wake the consumer loop head.
  • Producer-edge repair: if upstream completion exists but the downstream artifact is missing, wake the producer loop head.

Scan cadence and wake cadence are separate. Worked example (the numbers are illustrative; the scan-vs-wake separation is the durable rule): scan every 30 seconds, wake at most every 600 seconds while work remains actionable.

This is not a generic workflow engine. It's a guardrail against cold pools and missing edge artifacts.

Active surface

Daemon rig watchdog is the active host coordination surface for new work. History records only loud evaluations (sent / terminal); quiet skip reasons are NOT recorded — POC parity so agents are not woken about scheduler polls.

Future shape (current limit)

The mature primitive should be evidence-aware: inspect durable queue/workflow state, pane activity, transcript/context growth, and known workstream frontier; classify the intervention as no-op / wake / refocus / alignment-checkpoint; prefer no-op for active owners; render message text from the active orientation graph instead of hard-coding static policy.

Until queue substrate, activity state, and lifecycle evidence are fully productized at this level of granularity: keep config-layer use small and explicit, prefer one workflow watchdog plus targeted exception handling over many per-seat nag loops.

See also

  • refocus skill — the doctrine this primitive operationalizes; full and light trace templates
  • queue-handoff skill — durable handoff via queue items; watchdog is complementary (watchdog wakes; queue routes)
  • looping-workflows skill — operating discipline for self-driving rig-shaped loops; uses watchdog policies for loop edges

© mvschwarz, Apache-2.0. 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/_canonical/core/watchdog of mvschwarz/openrig.

Open the folder on GitHubat commit a29dfbc

Compare with similar skills

Watchdog 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.

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Watchdog this skillmvschwarz/openrig6.2k—~1.5kAutomated safety check: PassApache-2.0
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Using Superpowersfarm-fe/farm5.6k35 repos~1.4kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Executing Plans Inlineobra/superpowers297k2 repos~5.1kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Skill CreatorAzure/azqr79589 repos~8.2kAutomated safety check: PassApache-2.0

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Categories

Questions about Watchdog

What does Watchdog do?

A skill your agent uses when configuring rig watchdog policies, authoring wake/refocus/alignment-checkpoint messages, or choosing the right intervention level for a stale-owner situation. Watchdog is an agent skill from mvschwarz/openrig. Use when configuring rig watchdog policies, authoring wake/refocus/alignment-checkpoint messages, or choosing the right intervention level for a stale-owner situation.

When should I use Watchdog?

Watchdog fits situations like: configuring rig watchdog policies; authoring wake/refocus/alignment-checkpoint messages; choosing the right intervention level for a stale-owner situation.

How do I install Watchdog in Claude Code?

Run `npx skills add mvschwarz/openrig --skill watchdog -a claude-code`. Or copy the skill folder (skills/_canonical/core/watchdog in mvschwarz/openrig) into .claude/skills/watchdog in your project. Claude Code loads it when a task matches its description.

How do I install Watchdog in Codex?

Run `npx skills add mvschwarz/openrig --skill watchdog -a codex`. Or copy the skill folder (skills/_canonical/core/watchdog in mvschwarz/openrig) into .agents/skills/watchdog in your project. Codex loads it when a task matches its description.

Can I use Watchdog 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 mvschwarz/openrig --skill watchdog -a cursor` (or -a gemini-cli, github-copilot or opencode for the others). To copy it by hand, put the folder in .cursor/skills/watchdog, .gemini/skills/watchdog, .github/skills/watchdog and .opencode/skills/watchdog in your project.

What does Watchdog need to run?

SKILL.md names no scripts, command-line tools or credentials: Watchdog is instructions for the agent only.

Does Watchdog access the network?

SKILL.md contains no URLs. Any network use would come from the scripts or tools the agent runs. This is read from the text; nothing was executed.

Is Watchdog 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 Watchdog use?

Watchdog is published under the Apache-2.0 licence (the repository's licence). It allows redistribution, so the full SKILL.md is shown on this page.

How many tokens does Watchdog use?

About 1.5k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 5.9k 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 Watchdog?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with Watchdog: MCP Server Builder (anthropics/skills, 180k stars), Hook Development for Claude Code Plugins (anthropics/claude-plugins-official, 38k stars), Using Superpowers (farm-fe/farm, 5.6k stars) and Executing Plans Inline (obra/superpowers, 297k stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains Watchdog?

mvschwarz (a GitHub user) maintains it in mvschwarz/openrig, which has 6,242 GitHub stars. The repository holds 49 skills in this directory. The repository was last updated on October 9, 2026.

Source: mvschwarz/openrig on GitHub. Facts on this page come from the repository at the commit we read; the author's words are quoted as theirs.