report-progress
Report progress
Long work fails the reader in one of two ways, and both of them read as normal. The first is silence: forty minutes pass, something is happening, and the user cannot tell what, where, or whether it is still happening at all. The second is worse because it looks like the opposite — fluent narration that relays a child agent's self-report as established fact, so "all tests pass" arrives in the user's lap having never been run by anyone who could see the result.
Both leave the same hole: the reader cannot answer what is done, what is running, and what do I now know that I did not before? This skill fills that hole with a fixed shape, a line between verified and claimed, and a checklist that can be run over a report that has already been written.
It owns the report. It does not own the work, the child agents, or the truth about their
state — it consumes that from agent-lifecycle. It is not a summary of a diff; that is
describe-changes. And it is not a substitute for lifecycle telemetry: a well-written report
about children you cannot observe is a well-written guess.