Knowledge Wiki Orchestrata Ultimate

observe-work

Claude / Skills / user-observe-work

Source: user · Invoked as: observe-work · Loads in a $HOME session: yes

The observe-work skill is the rule "never wait blind": watch running work instead of blocking on it. Use it whenever a test suite is about to run, whenever work is delegated to a subagent, worktree or another agent, and whenever the user says "what's taking so long" or "check on the agents". It covers the deployed tools under /opt/orchestrata-tools (their own uv venv on python3.14t), which work in every project.

For tests: start pytest-live tests/unit -q & in the background, check observe-pytest list (instant) and stream with observe-pytest attach latest. pytest-live puts the observer plugin on PYTHONPATH from the deployed lib and pins the BLAS thread counts to 1, which free-threaded builds need. Never fire a batched pytest and wait for the dump; still cap runs at five minutes and run targeted modules. For delegated work: swarm-supervisor watch --worktree <path> --task-name <name> --stall-minutes 10, then check, status and unwatch. Its heartbeat is the newest of three real git signals, so an agent that edits without committing still counts, and alarms are edge-triggered. State is ~/.local/state/orchestrata/swarm-supervisor.json. The skill ends with a checklist for the moment you are about to wait.

All three binaries are present on this host. The guards that enforce the same rules are force-test-observation, test_run_context and no-unbounded-wait; a byte-identical copy ships in the plugin (orchestrata-observe-work). Related: RUL-009.

Skill file

Field Value
Name observe-work
Source ~/.claude/skills
Path ~/.claude/skills/observe-work/SKILL.md
Size 3742 bytes
Loads yes

Frontmatter description (quoted):

Never wait blind — watch running work instead of blocking on it. Use PROACTIVELY whenever you are about to run a test suite, whenever you delegate to a subagent/worktree/another agent, whenever you catch yourself waiting on something long, and whenever the user says "long wait", "what's taking so long", "check on the agents", "are the tests done", "don't just sit there". Also triggers on "run the tests", "run the suite", "spin up a swarm", "delegate this", "parallel agents". Covers the deployed tools at /opt/orchestrata-tools/bin — pytest-live, observe-pytest, swarm-supervisor — which work in EVERY project, not just orchestrata.

What it drives

Names Kind Status on this host
pytest-live binary on PATH: /usr/local/bin/pytest-live
pytest binary on PATH: /home/mohamed/.venv/bin/pytest
observe-pytest binary on PATH: /usr/local/bin/observe-pytest
swarm-supervisor binary on PATH: /usr/local/bin/swarm-supervisor
/opt/orchestrata-tools path present
~/.local/state/orchestrata/swarm-supervisor.json path present

Duplicates