Shiploop

Shiploop turns a plan into a durable, unattended shipping run. The human approves once, at kickoff. After that the run executes itself: a dependency-gated task graph drives one worker per phase, each phase ships through its own gated PR into a train branch, and a closeout worker delivers a reviewed final PR labeled for human review. Exceptions never page anyone mid-run - they block and wait.

Keep this skill as the router. Load only the reference needed for the current step.

If you were spawned by a daemon with a task naming a phase or closeout of an existing run, skip everything below: read references/worker-contract.md plus your adapter reference and execute. The rest of this file is for the interactive kickoff agent.

Roles

• Kickoff agent: the interactive agent reading this now. Normalizes the plan, gets one human approval, creates the ledger, branches, and the entire task graph. Then its job is over.
• Dispatch daemon: the adapter runtime (e.g. Hermes gateway) that spawns each task once its parent's completion has promoted it. It is the only thing that schedules work after kickoff.
• Phase worker: a spawned agent that ORCHESTRATES one phase end to end - branches, PRs, gates, evidence, ledger, merging its own phase PR. It never writes code itself. Contract: references/worker-contract.md.
• Implementer CLI: a coding agent CLI (default: codex exec) that makes every file change in the target repo. The phase worker hands it a small prompt plus the GitHub issue URL; the issue carries the full plan and acceptance criteria.
• Closeout worker: the last task in the graph. Opens the final PR, runs the review gate, marks it ready, labels the parent issue for human review.
• Human: approves kickoff, resolves blocked tasks, reviews and merges the final PR. Nothing else.

Use When