Skills

You were just seeded, read this first.

Skills are short, agent-facing instructions. They are written for the agent that is already inside a provider session and needs to know the local operating contract without crawling the whole docs site.

The current public lmctl contract is simple:

• Delegate with synchronous lmctl chat <teamfile> <alias> "<prompt>".
• Treat lmctl chat exit status as transport status, not task completion.
• By default, a busy receiver returns a busy error and creates no queued mail. The mailbox queue is opt-in with mailbox_queue_enabled=true or LMCTL_MAILBOX_QUEUE_ENABLED=true.
• Use lmctl chat --json and lmctl status to distinguish a busy result, opt-in queued work, and a finished member reply.
• Use lmctl chat ... --prompt-file <path> for non-trivial prompts. Positional prompts are built by the shell, so backticks, $(...), $VAR, and quotes can change before lmctl sees them. Write the prompt file with an editor or file-writing tool, not echo or a heredoc.
• Run lmctl status before important sends. In queue-enabled setups, run lmctl status --since 7d after queued sends and read Waiting on: / mailbox outbound; exit 0 can still mean queued.
• Keep durable project knowledge in durable-memory/ so a refreshed session or swapped provider keeps the same working memory.

Use the docs pages for human context. Use the raw skill files when you are an agent being asked to do the work.

Start here:

• Team Lead — basic for the everyday Lead loop.
• Verifying delegated work when you need to know whether a delegated turn actually finished.
• Mail inspection when status is not enough detail for queued or delivered messages.

lmctl team operation

Skill	Use it when
lmctl Lead	You are the Lead of one .lmctl team and need the core delegation/review loop.
Claude Code lmctl Lead	You are running an lmctl Lead inside Claude Code and need background dispatch, notification, Monitor, and stall-evidence discipline.
opencode lmctl Lead	You are running an lmctl Lead on opencode and need background CLI run, notification, and resubmission guidance.
lmctl-admin	You need read-only delivery, liveness, or orphan mailbox diagnostics over lmctl state.
Team Lead — basic	You need the everyday Lead checklist: delegate, review, keep durable memory current.
Team Lead — advanced	You need refresh, model-swap, health, or drift-recovery guidance.
lmctl disaster recovery	A project directory, .lmctl teamfile, or files got deleted and you need to reconstruct them from local event history and provider session transcripts.
Meta-Lead	You coordinate several teams or Leads.
Team Lead workflow	You need the shortest operating checklist for delegation and review.
Durable memory	You need to know what belongs in durable-memory/ and why it is committed.

Tool skills

Skill	Use it when
lmprobe	You need structural code search: files, grep, definitions, references, or graph queries.
lmchat	You need shared file-room handoff outside lmctl team chat.
lmmail	You need durable asynchronous mailboxes with message bodies and attachments.
lmnote	You need private per-user notebook files for durable agent notes.
lmsheet	You need simple per-user spreadsheets with Excel-style A1 addressing.
lmbio	You need local computational-biology helpers.
lmfin	You need local finance/market analytics helpers.
lmsound	You need text-to-speech output.
lmtext	You need speech-to-text transcription for audio files.

The raw skills index is also available at lmctl.com/skills.