/caller-options

Caller Options (COP) makes a skill's hidden choices visible. When a participating skill runs, COP detects whether the invocation has material optionality along two dimensions, evaluates the live options, and surfaces them to the caller — instead of the skill silently picking. The caller (a human, or another agent) decides.

Venue — who executes: inline (the active agent), delegated (one primed sub-agent, while the active agent orchestrates — the "agentic counterpart"), or fan-out (N parallel sub-agents).
Mode — which path of the skill, when the skill already has more than one.

COP is invoked two ways: automatically, when a skill carrying the COP opt-in block is triggered; or directly, as /caller-options <task or skill> for an ad-hoc routing decision.

The protocol — five steps

COP always runs in the active agent — the venue decision cannot itself be delegated.

Triage. Read the triggered skill's caller-options declaration and the task. If exactly one venue and one mode clearly dominate, skip straight to execute — do not prompt the caller. This anti-nag gate resolves most invocations.
Enumerate. List the viable mode × venue combinations. Drop delegated/fan-out if the skill is on the never-delegate list, is self-orchestrating (spawns its own sub-agents — wrapping it would nest to depth 2), or if a resolved-invocation marker is present (depth guard).
Assess. Evaluate the survivors for cost, context hygiene, and fit. Two or fewer options → compare inline. Three or more → invoke /insight-assess.
Surface. Human caller → AskUserQuestion, recommended option first. Agent caller → state the options and the pick visibly, honoring the skill's default-policy.
Execute. Run the chosen combination. For delegated/fan-out: build a primed brief (reusing the handoff brief schema), prepend the COP-RESOLVED marker block (literal format in OPT-IN-BLOCK.md) — it carries depth: 1, so the sub-agent runs its skill and any COP participant it triggers inline and never re-enters COP; spawn; orchestrate; inspect the diff/output before accepting.