Imported from RubyEyedReaper/Odin-Skills (
skills/project-manager/SKILL.md). Install upstream withnpx skills add RubyEyedReaper/Odin-Skills --skill project-manager. Copyright stays with the author.
project-manager — the layer above one project
Voice (ADR-0011). Prose to human stays Odin. The probe's own output is a deliverable: normal English, because a coordinator acts on it without reading this file.
What this is not for
projects owns one project. This skill owns the question one layer up, and owns nothing else.
| The task | Its owner | Why not this skill |
|---|---|---|
| Working inside one project — the routing table, the switch ritual, the artifact checklist | projects (ADR-0106) |
That is the whole of one project's lifecycle. This skill never enters a project; it reports across all of them. |
| What to build next, in what order, within a project | roadmap |
An ordering over items. This reports how many are open, and never which one is next. |
| What is left across the roadmap and the tracker at once, for a fleet | gauntlet frontier |
A work frontier computed at read time. This is a portfolio reading and schedules nothing. |
| Who owns a delegated session, and whether a worker is stalled | successor-manager |
Sessions and branches under a coordinator. This reports repositories. |
| Whether a delegated branch's work has landed | bl_classify — .claude/scripts/lib/branch-landedness.sh |
The one implementation of landedness. The probe calls it; a second copy would have no way to disagree out loud. |
| Whether a project's docs are in the right place | odin-project-doc-guard.sh |
A write-time guard and a CI scan. This reports which artifacts are absent; it never decides where one belongs. |
| Where a project's roadmap lives | roadmap_candidates — .claude/scripts/lib/roadmap-discovery.sh |
Discovery has one owner. |
The one thing this skill owns: the join — five directories read as one portfolio, with each dimension's unreadable case reported rather than folded into a verdict.
The probe
bash .claude/skills/project-manager/scripts/project-status.sh . \
[--json] [--dormant-days N] [--project SLUG]| Exit | Means |
|---|---|
| 0 | every project reported, every dimension measured |
| 1 | at least one dimension is undetermined — an input the probe could not read |
| 2 | could not look — no root, no projects/ directory, nothing under it, or a library it composes is missing |
It changes nothing: no fetch, no checkout, no write, no cleanup. A case in the matrix asserts
the file fingerprint, HEAD and the checked-out branch are all identical afterwards, because
read-only is a property of the effect and two recorded occurrences of
ci-gate/fixture-reads-ambient-state consumed the state they probed.
It also never runs a project's gate. A portfolio probe that spent an hour per project would be
run once and then avoided — and a project's gate is projects' business, per project.
The dimensions, and what each refuses to guess
| Dimension | Answers | Refuses |
|---|---|---|
| presence | populated / uninitialised / empty |
reporting an empty directory as a project missing files |
| activity | a day count, then active / dormant against --dormant-days |
a verdict whose input the reader cannot see |
| artifacts | the missing ones by name | a count, which does not say what to write |
| roadmap | <open>/<total> from the canonical JSON |
reading the generated ROADMAP.md, which is regenerated from it |
| branches | N unlanded, N landed, N unmeasured |
counting an unmeasured branch as landed |
| skills mirror | sp_mirror_state's four values |
treating an unpopulated submodule as an empty mirror |
Two defects the probe's own first run found, which is why it exists
Both produced confident, specific, wrong output, and both are now matrix cases.
git -C <dir> walks up. It succeeds for any path inside a repository, so a
projects/<slug>/ that is a plain subdirectory answered every branch question with the harness's
branches. Four projects reported the identical 8 unlanded, 13 landed — the harness's own branch
set, attributed to four repositories that do not have one. Four agreeing numbers is what made it
visible, exactly as in the incident branch-landedness.sh's own header records. The fix is
ps_is_repo_root: the directory must be a repository root, not merely sit in one.
An uninitialised submodule is an empty directory. Two projects reported
missing: README.md CHANGELOG.md docs/adr/ docs/roadmap/roadmap.json. Both have all four; they were
simply not checked out in that worktree. A probe that reads an empty directory and reports four
missing artifacts has not found four gaps — it has failed to look, and said something false about a
project as a result. The fix is ps_presence, measured before every other dimension, which is
sp_mirror_state's four-valued lesson applied one directory over.
The general rule both are instances of: undetermined is not a verdict and is never folded into
one (cli/coding-style.md § A Verdict Requires an Input You Actually Read). Four recorded
occurrences of that key are functions that composed a path, a probe or a join on an input they had
never established, and answered with a real word anyway.
Procedure
- Read the portfolio.
project-status.sh .— start here, before choosing where work goes. - Treat every
undeterminedas a question, never as a zero. An uninitialised submodule is answered by initialising it; an unreadable roadmap is a finding about that project. - Route each substantive finding to its owner. A missing artifact is
projects' checklist. An unlanded branch issuccessor-manager's register, orfinishing-a-development-branch. A stale roadmap isroadmap reconcile. This skill files nothing and fixes nothing. - Say what the reading was taken against. The day count and
--dormant-daysboth appear in the output; quote them, because "dormant" alone is a word whose threshold the reader cannot see.
Red flags
| Thought | Reality |
|---|---|
| "The project directory is empty, so it has no README" | It is an uninitialised submodule. You did not look. |
"git -C projects/x worked, so x is a repository" |
git walked up. You asked the harness. |
| "Zero open roadmap items — that project is done" | undetermined prints as undetermined, never as 0/0. Check which you read. |
| "No branch came back unlanded, so nothing is outstanding" | Read the unmeasured count in the same line. Silence about a branch is not that branch being clean. |
| "It says dormant, so drop it" | Dormant is a reading of a day count against a flag you chose. The count is printed; look at it. |
| "Add a gate run per project so the report is complete" | An hour-long probe is a probe nobody runs. Gates belong to each project. |
| "Have it initialise the missing submodules while it is there" | It changes nothing, and a matrix case asserts that. Fixing is somebody's act, with its own authorisation. |
Quick reference
| Need | Where |
|---|---|
| The whole portfolio | bash .claude/skills/project-manager/scripts/project-status.sh . |
| One project | … --project <slug> |
| Machine-readable | … --json (an unreadable dimension is null, never 0) |
| A different dormancy reading | … --dormant-days N |
| Working inside one project | projects |
| What is left for a fleet | gauntlet frontier |
| Whether a worker is stalled | successor-manager |
| What the probe refuses, and the near misses it must not | .claude/tests/project-manager-status.test.sh |