skill-to-agent-router

Skill to Agent Router

Purpose

Given a task description or skill name, determine which agent (or agents) in the roster is the correct executor — and which skills that agent should activate. Produce a routing decision with binding type (primary/optional/excluded), department assignment, and activation conditions. This is the dispatch layer between a task and the agent+skill combination that fulfils it, designed to prevent ambiguous self-selection and routing a privileged action to an agent that lacks the right tool access.

When to use

• An orchestrator receives a task and needs to know which agent to delegate it to.
• A task spans multiple domains and the right agent + skill combination is unclear.
• A new skill has been installed and its agent bindings need configuring.
• An agent roster has grown and routing rules need auditing for gaps or conflicts.
• A user asks "which agent should handle X?" and the answer is not obvious.

When not to use

• The task is to find which skill to use, not which agent — use 71-skill-librarian.
• The task is already inside an agent session and skill selection is the only remaining question.
• The agent is already fixed by explicit user instruction — route to it without running this skill.
• The routing question concerns external services or APIs, not the internal agent roster.

Procedure

1. Parse the task. Extract domain, action, audience (human-facing vs. system), urgency, and stated constraints ("do not touch production", "must use approved vendor").
2. Scan the agent roster. Read only the name:, description:, and skills: frontmatter from each AGENT.md (see Commands).
3. Match task to agent by domain using the table below.
4. Assign binding types. Primary: best-fit executor; the skill is a required binding. Optional: can handle the task with this skill loaded on demand. Excluded: must not handle this task (wrong domain, conflict of interest, missing tool access).
5. Check for multi-agent tasks. If the task needs outputs from more than one domain, propose a handoff chain — sequential (A produces, B consumes) or parallel (both run, orchestrator merges).
6. Check activation conditions. Some agents are valid only under conditions: time-based (scheduled, real-time), data-access (requires DB connection or API key), or approval-gate (requires human sign-off). State these in the decision.
7. Output the routing decision.

Domain-to-agent map:

Task domain	Likely agent family
Product / PRD / requirements	product-manager, product-analyst
Market research / competitive	researcher, analyst
Business model / unit economics	finance-analyst, strategy
Pricing / packaging	product-manager, revenue-ops
Technical writing / docs	technical-writer, developer-relations
ADR / architecture decisions	architect, senior-engineer
Skill library meta-tasks	skill-librarian-agent, orchestrator
Installation / path hygiene	sysadmin, devops
Code / engineering	engineer, developer

Concrete checks

• Task domain, action, and constraints parsed before scanning.
• Agent roster scanned by frontmatter only (not full AGENT.md bodies).
• Primary agent designated with an explicit skill binding.
• Optional and excluded agents listed with reasons.
• Multi-agent handoff chain proposed if the task spans domains, with direction stated.
• Activation conditions stated for each binding (none / time / data / approval).
• No agent recommended that lacks the required tool access for the task.
• Destructive or production-touching tasks carry a human-approval activation condition.

Commands or Templates

# Roster scan: name, description, and skill bindings per agent
grep -rn "^name:\|^description:\|^skills:" ~/.claude/agents/*/AGENT.md | head -200

# Which agents already bind a given skill?
grep -rln "security-and-secrets-review" ~/.claude/agents/*/AGENT.md

# Detect agents with NO skills binding (routing gap candidates)
for d in ~/.claude/agents/*/; do
  grep -q "^skills:" "$d/AGENT.md" 2>/dev/null || echo "no skills bound: $(basename "$d")"
done

## Skill-to-Agent Routing Decision

Task: [parsed task]   Domain: [domain]   Action: [action]

### Primary routing
Agent: [agent-name]
Skill binding: [skill-name] — Primary
Rationale: [one sentence]
Activation conditions: [none / list]

### Optional bindings
| Agent | Skill | Condition for activation |
|-------|-------|--------------------------|

### Excluded agents
| Agent | Reason |
|-------|--------|

### Multi-agent handoff (if applicable)
Step 1: [agent-A] runs [skill-X] → produces [artifact]
Step 2: [agent-B] consumes [artifact] → runs [skill-Y] → produces [final]
Orchestrator merges: [yes/no]

### Unresolved routing gaps
[task aspects no current agent covers — flag for roster expansion]

Worked routing example

Task: "draft a PRD for the new export feature, backed by a competitor comparison, and turn it into an ADR for the storage-format decision." Parsed: three domains (product, research, architecture), action = generate, audience = internal, no production touch.

This is a multi-agent task — no single agent owns all three. The routing decision:

• Primary: product-manager with 65-product-requirements-review (owns the PRD).
• Sequential dependency: researcher with 66-market-research-synthesis must run first — the PRD's positioning section consumes its competitor comparison. So step 1 is research, step 2 is the PRD.
• Then architect with 70-adr-generator consumes the PRD's storage requirement to produce the ADR (step 3).
• Excluded: engineer (no implementation in scope yet); the orchestrator is the dispatcher, not an executor.
• Activation conditions: none are destructive or production-touching, so no approval gate is required.

Handoff chain: researcher → product-manager → architect, with the orchestrator owning the final merged deliverable (PRD + ADR). Stating the direction explicitly prevents the common failure of two agents both producing a half-PRD with no agreed owner of the final artifact.

Common issues & anti-patterns

• Routing to the orchestrator for everything. The orchestrator delegates; it does not execute domain tasks. Route to the leaf agent.
• Binding every skill as primary. Only the skills directly needed are primary; over-binding bloats agent context.
• Missing the handoff direction. "Agent A and Agent B both handle this" without saying who goes first or who owns the final output.
• Ignoring tool-access constraints. Routing a DB query task to an agent with no DB tool binding.
• Routing to the most capable, not the most appropriate. A senior-engineer agent can write docs, but that is the technical-writer's role. Respect domain ownership.
• No exclusion list. A roster without explicit exclusions routes ambiguously — agents self-select incorrectly.
• No approval gate on a destructive route. Sending a "delete prod records" task to an agent without a human-approval condition risks silent damage.

Choosing the binding type

The primary/optional/excluded distinction is what makes routing deterministic. Apply it with this test:

• Primary — the agent owns this domain and the skill is needed for this task. Bind it. Exactly one agent is primary per task (or per step in a chain).
• Optional — the agent could handle the task if the skill is loaded on demand, but it is not the owner. Useful as a fallback when the primary is unavailable or overloaded. Do not pre-load optional skills into the agent's always-on context.
• Excluded — explicitly name agents that must not take this task: wrong domain, missing tool access, or a conflict of interest. An empty exclusion list is the most common cause of ambiguous self-selection, where two agents both think the task is theirs.

The rule: bind as primary only the skills the task actually requires, list optionals as on-demand, and always populate the exclusion list — routing without exclusions is routing by guess.

Required output

Return the routing decision block above: parsed task with domain/action, the primary agent and its skill binding with rationale and activation conditions, optional and excluded agent tables, a multi-agent handoff chain where applicable (with explicit direction and merge ownership), and any unresolved routing gaps flagged for roster expansion.

Safety

• Do not modify AGENT.md files during a routing query — this is a read-only recommendation.
• Do not route tasks involving secret or credential handling to agents that lack explicit vault/secret-manager tool access.
• If a task involves destructive operations (delete, overwrite, production deploy), add an explicit human-approval activation condition to the routing decision.
• Do not recommend an agent that lacks a required tool binding without flagging the gap.

Completion criteria

Done means the task was parsed, the roster was scanned by frontmatter only, a primary agent and skill binding were designated with rationale, optional/excluded agents and any handoff chain were listed, activation conditions were stated, and destructive routes carry an approval gate.