Agents Reference
This is the complete, no-omissions list of every agent in ai-core-kit. An
agent is a specialized subagent Claude delegates to (via Task) when its
description trigger matches. Agents split along the
META vs CHILD boundary:
- META build team —
.claude/agents/. Phase specialists that/ack-buildspawns to author the kit itself. Never rendered into a fork. - CHILD reusable fleet —
templates/agents/. The everyday delivery and review agents that/ack-initrenders into a fork, including the RPI-flow agents.
.claude/agents/) author the kit during /ack-build; CHILD agents (templates/agents/) are rendered into a fork by /ack-init — the RPI-flow agents plus the engineering review fleet.
META — build team (.claude/agents/)
/ack-build spawns these per phase in a ground-truth → author → adversarial-QA
team. They write only META artifacts; a worker that would write a concrete
project.manifest.yaml or contract instance at the META root is a layer
violation and is refused. Not rendered into forks.
| Agent | Layer | What it does | Trigger / when |
|---|---|---|---|
contract | META | Authors the CHILD-payload methodology — the contract template and the 3-mode manifest-driven contract-gate hook. | Contract template, contract gate, gate modes, approved-oracle, design-contract-first scaffolding. |
design-system | META | Authors the fullstack archetype’s design-system payload — frontend-design and brand-guidelines-derived skills plus a design-tokens scaffold. | Design system, design tokens, frontend-design skill, brand-guidelines, fullstack UI scaffold. |
infra | META | Authors META-layer platform plumbing — the .claude/ tree, the project .mcp.json, the offline telemetry aggregator + pricing.json. | settings.json, .claude layout, MCP wiring, telemetry aggregator, pricing.json, budgets, linter/validator script. |
qa | META | Validates phase artifacts against acceptance tests and adversarially verifies the two-layer boundary at the end of every phase. | Validate, verify against acceptance tests, QA this phase, test-fork the archetypes. |
research | META | Extracts ground truth from reference repositories or the Anthropic docs — exact conventions and per-repo license. | Extract conventions, verify against docs, what does <repo> actually do, build the license ledger. |
template | META | Authors or revises the CHILD-payload template sets — the archetype trees, interview questions.yaml, render map. | Archetype templates, scaffold the <archetype> tree, interview branching, questions.yaml, render.map. |
CHILD — reusable fleet (templates/agents/)
The RPI + review fleet that /ack-init renders into a fork. The model column is
the agent’s declared model tier.
RPI-flow agents
The two agents that drive the RPI loop (Research → Plan → Implement).
| Agent | Layer | Model | What it does | Trigger / when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
requirement-parser | CHILD | sonnet | Turns an unstructured feature request into structured requirements, goals, constraints, complexity, and clarifying questions. | Parse this request, what exactly are we building. RPI research step 1; rendered when features.rpi == true. |
constitutional-validator | CHILD | opus | Validates roadmap items, features, and technical decisions against the project’s constitution, principles, and chosen archetype. | Does this fit our principles, validate against the constitution, is this in scope. RPI research→plan gate. |
Engineering & review agents
| Agent | Layer | Model | What it does | Trigger / when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
architect | CHILD | opus | Software-architecture specialist for system design, scalability, and technical trade-off decisions — produces high-level designs, component responsibilities, data flows, API contracts, ADRs. | Design this, how should we structure, what are the trade-offs, write an ADR. RPI plan phase. |
code-explorer | CHILD | sonnet | Codebase-analysis specialist that traces execution paths, maps architecture layers, and documents dependencies so new work starts grounded in code reality. | How does X work, trace this flow, map the architecture, what touches this module. Discovery step of RPI. |
code-reviewer | CHILD | sonnet | Senior code-review specialist that reviews a diff for correctness, security, and maintainability and returns severity-ranked, evidence-backed findings. | Review this, check my changes, is this PR ready. |
refactor-cleaner | CHILD | sonnet | Dead-code cleanup and consolidation specialist that finds unused code, exports, dependencies, and duplicates, then removes them safely in small verified batches. | Remove dead code, clean up unused imports/deps, consolidate duplicates, tidy the codebase. |
security-reviewer | CHILD | sonnet | Security-vulnerability detection and remediation specialist that scans changed code for OWASP Top 10 issues, hardcoded secrets, injection, SSRF, and unsafe crypto. | Security review, is this safe, check for vulnerabilities. |
silent-failure-hunter | CHILD | sonnet | Error-handling auditor that hunts silent failures — swallowed exceptions, empty catch blocks, dangerous fallbacks, lost stack traces, and missing error propagation. | Find swallowed errors, why is this failing silently, audit error handling. |
Subagents that are not kit agents.
skill-creator/agents/{analyzer, comparator,grader}.mdare internal sub-agent prompts of theskill-creatorskill — they carry no kit agent frontmatter and are not linted or rendered as standalone agents.
See also: Skills Reference, Commands Reference, Skills Catalog (provenance + license).