Communicate (Cross-Repo + Mesh)

Steward's job is alignment across the AgentCulture mesh; that surfaces in four distinct channels:

• Tracked, async hand-offs — a gap in another repo (a missing public API, a divergent skill, a documentation ask) where an agent on the other side needs to act, and the ask should outlive the conversation. → post-issue.sh (GitHub).
• Follow-up on a tracked thread — a status update, an answer to a question, or a "this is done" note on an issue that's already open. → post-comment.sh (GitHub).
• Inbound state read — pulling current issue body + comments from a sibling repo so a brief or plan can inline what's there instead of saying "see issue #N." → fetch-issues.sh (GitHub).
• Ephemeral coordination — a status ping, a question, a "PR ready for merge" notice on a Culture mesh channel where the audience is already listening. → mesh-message.sh (Culture IRC).

All four live under one skill because they share the same audience (sibling-repo agents) and the same red flag (don't double-post the same ask across post + mesh — pick one).

Backed by agtag

The three GitHub verbs (post-issue.sh, post-comment.sh, fetch-issues.sh) are thin wrappers around the agtag CLI (agtag issue post|reply|fetch). agtag handles auto-signature resolution from the local culture.yaml (falling back to repo basename), JSON output mode, and a uniform exit-code policy. Read agtag learn for the agent-facing self-teaching prompt and agtag explain agtag / agtag explain issue for the surface docs — this SKILL.md does not re-document agtag's flags.

mesh-message.sh stays a culture channel message wrapper for now; agtag mesh transport is slated for v0.2.

When to Use

Issue mode (post-issue.sh)

• A gap surfaces in another repo's surface (missing public API, wire-format compat fix, divergent skill, documentation ask).
• You're handing off a self-contained brief to a sibling-repo agent.
• (steward-specific — supplier role.) You're onboarding a sibling to the stack — "set it up", "align it", "update it with our stack", "set up the pipelines". The deliverable is an issue with a self-contained brief, never files written into that repo. In steward, quote steward's docs/sibling-pattern.md (required artifacts) and docs/skill-sources.md (the skill set to vendor) into the brief so it stands alone; steward's CLAUDE.md "Steward's lane" section is the canonical statement. Downstream vendors of this skill don't onboard siblings — those steward-side docs don't exist in your repo, so skip this bullet.
• You're asking a question that benefits from a tracked artifact rather than ephemeral chat.

Broadcast mode (steward announce-skill-update)

• You bumped a skill in .claude/skills/<name>/ and the change is more than identifier-only or doc-only — downstream consumers will benefit from re-vendoring.
• Don't hand-author the brief — the steward announce-skill-update verb (steward-cli) renders the canonical six-section form (what's stale, cite locations, what's in upstream now, recipe, acceptance criteria, references) from the live state of .claude/skills/<name>/scripts/, the CHANGELOG.md, and docs/skill-sources.md's downstream column. Then it pipes through this skill's post-issue.sh per consumer (so the auto-signature stays consistent with hand-authored briefs).

Mesh mode (mesh-message.sh)

• You want to ping a Culture channel with a status update ("PR #N ready for merge", "starting nightly corpus scan").
• You're asking a question where you expect a fast reply from whoever is listening on the channel right now.
• You're announcing a decision that doesn't need a tracked artifact.

Comment mode (post-comment.sh)

• An open issue needs a follow-up — a status update, an answer to a maintainer's question, a "this is shipped" note pointing at a PR.
• You're closing the loop on an agtag issue post you sent earlier and the resolution belongs on the same thread (audit trail beats a separate ping).
• Auto-signed by agtag; do not hand-author the trailing nick.

Fetch mode (fetch-issues.sh)

• You're about to write a brief and want to inline the current state of one or more sibling-repo issues (body + comments) instead of saying "see issue #N."
• You're triaging a list of cross-repo issues and want their bodies and comments in one shot for context.
• Avoids the gh issue view "Projects (classic) deprecated" error by passing --json explicitly to GitHub.

When NOT to Use

• In-steward issues — open them with gh issue create directly, or work them through the cicd skill.
• PR review comments — that's the cicd skill (which already auto-signs replies).
• Routine commits — those don't get cross-repo signatures.
• Long-form asks on the mesh — anything that needs acceptance criteria belongs in an issue, not a channel message.

Conventions

1. Briefs are self-contained

The receiving agent must not need steward-side context to act. Inline the relevant content; do not say "see steward's plan."

A brief that says "see steward#NN" is a bug. The receiving agent will look at it, get lost in steward-specific context that's irrelevant to them, and either ask for clarification (slow round-trip) or guess wrong (worse). Inline the ask, the rationale, and concrete acceptance criteria. Quote source-of-truth files (path + line numbers + small excerpts) when their shape matters to the ask.

2. Per-channel signature rules

Channel	Signature	Why
GitHub issues / comments	- <nick> (Claude) — agtag resolves <nick> from the local culture.yaml, falling back to repo basename	Cross-repo audit trail — readers can tell at a glance which sibling and that it came from an AI.
Culture mesh	none — unsigned	The IRC nick already identifies the speaker. A trailing - <nick> (Claude) would be visual noise that the nick already supplies.

Vendors do not need to edit a literal — agtag does the resolution. --as NICK overrides if a vendor needs to sign as something other than its culture.yaml suffix. Mesh messages stay unsigned across all vendors.

3. Issue title format

<verb> <thing> (unblocks <consumer>) — e.g., Vendor portability-lint into <repo> (unblocks steward 0.7 doctor --apply). The parenthetical tells the receiving repo's maintainers what's waiting on them. Drop the parenthetical only when the ask isn't blocking anything.

How to Invoke

File a new issue

bash .claude/skills/communicate/scripts/post-issue.sh \
    --repo agentculture/<sibling> \
    --title "Vendor portability-lint into <sibling> (unblocks steward 0.7)" \
    --body-file /tmp/brief.md

Or pass the body on stdin:

bash .claude/skills/communicate/scripts/post-issue.sh \
    --repo agentculture/<sibling> \
    --title "..." <<'EOF'
<brief body here, multi-paragraph, with all the inline context the receiving agent needs>
EOF

The script prints the issue URL on success — capture it for cross-references in your spec / plan / PR description. agtag appends the signature - <nick> (Claude) (resolved from culture.yaml).

Broadcast a skill update to known consumers

This is steward's role specifically — the verb lives in steward-cli, not in this skill's scripts/. Downstream vendors of communicate (cfafi, culture, auntiepypi, …) do not get a broadcast wrapper because they don't broadcast — they only use the primitives above (post-issue.sh, fetch-issues.sh, mesh-message.sh).

# Default: read consumers from docs/skill-sources.md "Downstream copies"
# cell for <skill>; render the six-section brief; pipe to post-issue.sh
# for each consumer.
steward announce-skill-update --skill cicd --since 0.6.0

# Override the consumer list (skips the ledger lookup entirely):
steward announce-skill-update --skill cicd \
    --to agentculture/auntiepypi --to agentculture/cfafi

# Preview without posting:
steward announce-skill-update --skill cicd \
    --to agentculture/auntiepypi --dry-run

# Just print the consumer list (for ledger sanity-checks):
steward announce-skill-update --skill cicd --list

--since VERSION controls which CHANGELOG entries get inlined (every entry from the top down to but not including the cutoff version). Without it, the verb keyword-filters CHANGELOG entries to those mentioning the skill name. --note-file PATH appends free-text under the upstream script list for skill-specific gotchas the generic template can't anticipate (e.g. "this skill's post-issue.sh hard-codes a signature literal — your vendor must change it"). The brief is rendered once and reused across consumers; per-consumer failures stream to stderr and the verb exits 1 if any failed. The template lives at scripts/templates/skill-update-brief.md so future supplier-role repos can render their own briefs from the same shape.

Fast recipe — "brief sibling-repo Z on skill X"

This shape of ask is a recipe, not a planning question. Skip plan mode. The call site:

steward announce-skill-update \
    --skill <name> --to <owner>/<repo> \
    --since <last-stable-version> \
    [--note-file /tmp/note.md] --dry-run

Eyeball the rendered brief; drop --dry-run to post. The verb prints the issue URL on success and exits non-zero on failure — that is the verification. Don't write parallel gh issue list / gh issue view checks unless the verb itself is what you're testing. --to overrides the ledger, so non-ledger consumers don't require a ledger edit first; they enter the ledger later when they confirm their vendored shape.

Comment on an existing issue

bash .claude/skills/communicate/scripts/post-comment.sh \
    --repo agentculture/<sibling> \
    --number 42 \
    --body-file /tmp/follow-up.md

Or pipe the body in:

bash .claude/skills/communicate/scripts/post-comment.sh \
    --repo agentculture/<sibling> \
    --number 42 <<'EOF'
PR #87 has shipped — closing the loop on this thread.
EOF

Auto-signed by agtag from culture.yaml; do not hand-author the trailing nick.

Send a mesh channel message

bash .claude/skills/communicate/scripts/mesh-message.sh \
    --channel "#general" \
    --body "PR #42 — all review threads addressed. Ready for merge."

Body can also come from --body-file PATH or stdin. The script wraps culture channel message <target> <text> and forwards exit codes unchanged, so failures (no Culture server, agent not connected) surface verbatim. No signature is appended — the IRC nick is the speaker.

Fetch sibling-repo issues

bash .claude/skills/communicate/scripts/fetch-issues.sh 191 --repo agentculture/culture
bash .claude/skills/communicate/scripts/fetch-issues.sh 191-197 --repo agentculture/culture
bash .claude/skills/communicate/scripts/fetch-issues.sh 191 195 197

Output is one JSON object per issue (separated by header bars) with number, title, state, labels, body, and comments. Without --repo, gh resolves the repo from the current git remote. Failures on a single issue print ERROR: Could not fetch issue #N and continue with the next one.

Steward is not a registered mesh agent today (see the cicd SKILL.md note). The script works once steward has been registered and started via culture agent register + culture start spark-steward; until then, calling it will fail with whatever error the Culture CLI returns, which is the right behavior — fix the registration, don't paper over it.

Scripts

Script	Purpose
scripts/post-issue.sh	Create a new issue on a target repo. Wraps agtag issue post; auto-signs from culture.yaml.
scripts/post-comment.sh	Comment on an existing issue. Wraps agtag issue reply; auto-signs from culture.yaml.
scripts/fetch-issues.sh	Fetch one or more issues (single / range / list) with body + comments. Wraps agtag issue fetch.
scripts/mesh-message.sh	Send a message to a Culture mesh channel. Unsigned (IRC nick is the speaker).
scripts/templates/skill-update-brief.md	The Markdown template consumed by steward announce-skill-update (the broadcast verb lives in steward-cli, not in this skill). Six fixed sections; placeholder syntax {{NAME}}.

More scripts can land here as the communication footprint grows — mesh-ask.sh for question-shaped pings via culture channel ask, agtag-mesh wrappers once agtag message ships in v0.2, etc. Add them when there's a second concrete need; do not pre-build for hypotheticals.

Red Flags

Never:

• Scaffold or write files into the target repo when the ask is an issue on it. Handing off / onboarding is an issue, not an edit — a direct "set them up" is still an instruction to file the brief. (In steward this is the "Steward's lane" rule; the principle holds for any vendor of this skill.)
• Post a brief that says "see steward's plan" without inlining the content. Briefs must be self-contained.
• Skip the issue signature. The script enforces it; do not introduce a --no-signature flag.
• Sign mesh messages with - <nick> (Claude). The nick already says who you are.
• Use this skill for in-steward issues — use gh issue create or the cicd skill instead.
• Manually type - <nick> (Claude) at the end of an issue or comment body — agtag appends it. Manual typing creates double-signatures.
• Post the same ask twice across channels (issue + mesh). Pick one. Tracked → issue. Ephemeral → mesh.
• Use mesh mode for anything that needs acceptance criteria. If the receiving agent has to decide "did I do this right?", you owe them an issue.