Claude Delegate

When to Use

• You want to delegate a bounded coding task to a separate claude implementer (Claude Code) and then review its diff yourself.
• The user explicitly asked for delegation to this implementer.

You are the orchestrator. Delegate one bounded coding task to a separate implementer — a Claude Code CLI session — then review what it produced and land it yourself. You write the brief and own the judgment; the separate Claude session edits the working tree; you verify and commit.

This skill is not a signal for the current Claude to implement directly. Use it only after the human explicitly asks for delegation to another Claude Code process or session.

When not to use this

• The human asked the current agent to implement the task directly.
• The task is small enough to do inline and the human did not request delegation.
• The claude CLI is missing or unauthenticated (claude auth status).
• The task needs a stronger host boundary than Claude Code's tool permissions and shell-only sandbox provide. Use an isolated container or VM for that requirement.

Prerequisites

1. claude --version succeeds.
2. claude auth status reports an authenticated session. On macOS the live credentials sit in the login Keychain; when the orchestrator's own sandbox blocks Keychain access (Codex's sandbox does), claude falls back to a possibly stale credentials file and reports loggedIn: false even though the login is valid. Re-run the check — and the dispatch itself — with that sandbox escalated or outside it before concluding the CLI is unauthenticated.
3. The target repository is the directory passed with --cd.
4. On Linux/WSL2, Claude's sandbox dependencies are installed. The normal relay profile is configured to fail when the sandbox is unavailable instead of silently running shell commands unsandboxed. Existing merged settings can still affect the effective boundary.

The loop

1. Write the brief

The separate session has no orchestrator chat history. It receives the brief on stdin and can inspect the target working tree.

Claude Code automatically discovers the target project's CLAUDE.md and normal local Claude configuration because the relay does not use --bare. It does not generically auto-load AGENTS.md. Read AGENTS.md yourself and copy every load-bearing constraint and the real gate commands into the brief. Tell the implementer not to commit. Keep one task per brief.

Template and details: references/writing-the-brief.md.

2. Dispatch

node "<skill-dir>/scripts/relay.mjs" --brief brief.txt --cd /path/to/repo
# review/diagnosis only:                 add --read-only
# continue the latest session:           add --resume-last
# continue the recorded session:         add --session <id>
# choose limits:                         add --max-turns 40 --max-budget-usd 10
# hard relay deadline:                   add --timeout 2h
# inspect every option:                  node .../relay.mjs --help

<skill-dir> is this installed skill directory, the folder containing this SKILL.md.

The relay runs claude -p --output-format stream-json --verbose, sends the brief through stdin, and writes artifacts under the system temp directory by default. It never uses --bg or --bare, and it never commits. See references/dispatch-and-poll.md.

3. Wait

The relay blocks until Claude exits. Use the orchestrator's background-command facility, or run it in the foreground and wait. Completion means the process exited and result.json exists.

• A pre-run usage error exits 2 and writes no result.json.
• A missing claude exits 127 and writes status: "claude_unavailable".
• Timeout and caught relay signals terminate the whole implementer process tree and preserve an outcome artifact.

Read finalMessage, touchedFiles, resultSubtype, and the raw artifact paths from result.json.

4. Review

Treat the implementer's report and gate outcomes as claims:

• Review edits to existing tests before a green gate means anything.
• Re-run the project's actual gates yourself.
• Read the complete diff against the brief, starting with touchedFiles.
• Inspect untracked and staged content as well as the ordinary diff.
• Run relevant guard skills if installed.

Full checklist: references/review-and-land.md.

5. Land

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