For AI agents#

openloops ships artifacts for coding agents alongside its code. This page lists them, says where each lives in the repository, and points at the machine-readable copies of this documentation.

Skills#

Skills are folders holding a SKILL.md (the Agent Skills format): a description that tells an agent when to use it and a body with the procedure. Install one into your agent with gh skill (any host: --agent claude-code, copilot, cursor, codex, gemini), or use the copy bundled in the wheel.

openloops#

Answer “what is being done, and what needs my attention?” across every coding session and every repository, by running the ol command and synthesising its answers rather than pasting them. Use when the user asks what needs their attention, what their agents have been doing or left unfinished, what they missed while they were away, what they still owe an agent, what is blocked or waiting on another repo, or what quietly became unblocked and nobody noticed. Triggers on: ‘what needs my attention’, ‘anything waiting on me’, ‘catch me up’, ‘what did I miss’, ‘where are we’, ‘status across my sessions’, ‘what are my agents doing’, ‘what did my sessions leave open’, ‘what do I owe’, ‘what am I blocked on’, ‘what can I start now’, ‘give me the overview’, ‘morning briefing’, ‘what should I look at first’, ‘is anything stuck’. Also use before planning a day’s work, so the plan starts from what is outstanding rather than from memory. Read-only: it never closes, reopens or relabels anything.

gh skill install thorwhalen/openloops openloops --agent claude-code

Source: openloops/data/skills/openloops (bundled with the pip package).

openloops-needs-human#

Use the moment you are blocked on the human and cannot finish on your own: a secret or API key only they can set; a command only they can run (a deploy, a sudo, a step your permissions refuse); access you do not have; a purchase, an approval, a decision only they can make; or a decision ALREADY RECORDED – an ADR, a convention, a default – that is now in your way or looks wrong given what you now know. Files the blocker as a manual-task GitHub issue in the affected repo, carrying a shell predicate, so the obligation outlives the session instead of dying in a message nobody re-reads and ol owed can re-check it later. Triggers on: ‘I can’t do this without you’, ‘you’ll need to run this’, ‘this needs your credentials’, ‘blocked on’, ‘someone has to decide’, ‘I don’t have access to’, ‘the ADR says X but’, or any point where the honest next step is to hand the work back. File it BEFORE writing the hand-back message, not instead of it. Skip when you could do the thing yourself.

gh skill install thorwhalen/openloops openloops-needs-human --agent claude-code

Source: openloops/data/skills/openloops-needs-human (bundled with the pip package).

The bundled skills are also on disk after pip install openloops, under the package’s data/skills/ directory; link them into an agent without network access with skill link-skills <that directory>.

Subagents#

Subagents are Markdown files with a frontmatter (name, description, tools) and a system prompt as the body. Copy one into your project’s .claude/agents/ (or your agent host’s equivalent) to delegate the task it describes.

openloops-sweep#

Runs the openloops sweep (ol, ol owed, ol blocked) in a fresh context and returns a short synthesis of what needs the user’s attention, what is now free to proceed, and what is in flight — never the raw command output. Invoke whenever the user asks what needs their attention, what their agents left open, what they owe, what is blocked or newly unblocked, or for a catch-up across their sessions. Read-only: it never closes, reopens, relabels or comments on anything.

Source: openloops/data/agents/openloops-sweep.md; tools: Bash.

Instruction files#

Files agents read before working in this repository.

Machine-readable documentation#

This site publishes the same documentation in forms that fit an agent’s context window:

  • llms.txt: an index of every page with a one-line description (llms.txt format)

  • openloops.md: the whole documentation as one Markdown file

  • <page>.html.md: a rendered Markdown twin of every page, advertised from each page’s <head> with <link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown">

  • objects.inv: the Sphinx inventory: a symbol-to-URL index (sphobjinv convert plain objects.inv -)