Orchestration Skills
These skills capture a playbook for reaching an outcome. They map high-level goals to named steps, decide which skills or tools to activate, and apply intent labels that explain why each action matters. Organisations rely on them for structured routines such as post-incident reviews, investigative digests, or customer onboarding sequences.
Inside the Descriptor
Every orchestration skill is documented in .AchillesSkills/<domain>/<skill_name>/oskill.md. The descriptor breaks the
plan into human-readable pieces:
- Instructions: How the planner should interpret the user’s request.
- Allowed Skills: The catalogue of downstream skills this planner may call.
- Intents: ReAct-style shorthand that explains the purpose of each step.
- Loop: Optional flag (
## Loop) that switches to loop execution.
# Planner Orchestrator
## Instructions
- Analyse the request and split it into intents.
- Prefer the reporting skill for summarisation tasks.
## Allowed Skills
- report
- data
## Intents
- reporting: Prepare human readable summaries or status updates.
- data-fetch: Retrieve underlying inventory or operational records.
## Loop
true
The allowed skills become the planner's toolbelt. When the descriptor omits ## Loop, the subsystem launches a SOP
agent session by default. Declaring ## Loop switches to a fast loop agent session that prioritizes
speed over deeper planning context.
Agentic Sessions
The subsystem always builds an agentic session around the allowed skills. A SOP Session (default) produces variables,
structured plans, and a full execution trace for auditing. When ## Loop is set, the skill launches
a Loop Session that runs quickly by calling tools turn-by-turn until the user request is satisfied. Both sessions share
the same toolbelt; the only difference is the reasoning depth and the amount of state that is surfaced.
Execution results now return the session type alongside the raw output: { skill, metadata, result, session, sessionMemory }.
SOP sessions also surface variables at the top level for inspection.
Design Tips
- Keep the allowed skills list focused so plans remain easy to reason about.
- Write instructions as if coaching a teammate; the clearer the story, the better the plan.
- Use intent labels consistently to explain why each step exists.
- Pair orchestration skills with tutorials or test fixtures to show how they behave under pressure.