Claude agents — Claude Code headless as a partner

Any agent can run Claude Code non-interactively (claude -p) and get a full Claude Code session back: the repository's instructions, its tools, a conversation that can be continued. Used that way it is a partner, same standing as the agent calling it — a peer that argues a decision through, a builder that takes a stage, or a reviewer that has never seen the build. This skill is how to brief it, which mode to run it in, and the mechanics, through the wrapper in <skill dir>/scripts/claude_agent.py.

The partner discipline (compact)

The full doctrine is the delegation skill; this is what must hold even when this folder is copied alone.

1. A delegate gets the why, not just the what. The goal in the owner's terms, the decision it feeds, the facts, the reasoning behind non-obvious choices, the constraints that bind and the traps a smart newcomer would walk into, and how the result will be proved. Never a keystroke script: no prescribed paths, filenames, libraries or steps unless they are hard constraints. A brief with the goal in it comes back with judgement; an instruction-only brief comes back compliant and wrong in the large.
2. Peer, not tool. Its view is not binding, and neither is yours. A choice you would not have made is a disagreement to surface, not a defect.
3. Early, not late. The cheapest wins are at framing: the angle, the load-bearing claim, what to cut. A late sign-off is the least valuable use.
4. Iterate. Three to eight turns is normal. Stopping at turn 1 because a draft came back treats a partner as a one-shot generator.
5. Converge before surfacing. The human arbitrates intent and taste, not trade-offs two agents could argue through. Bring one result, or a disagreement stated cleanly.
6. A delegated diff is unreviewed code, and the session that wrote it never clears it. Read it, check the disk, re-run the gate yourself; the independent review is a fresh session (independent-review).
7. What never delegates: deciding what the product should do; accepting or rejecting a review finding; anything that touches a real system, development included (a deploy, a migration applied to any database, a server's secrets, a live setting): the builder makes each one command and names it, and you run it; final verification; the judgement that a stage is done.
8. Size, not time. If the brief would be nearly as long as the diff, write the diff yourself.

Peer, builder or reviewer