Smithers

Drive Smithers, a durable control plane for long-running coding agents, from Claude Code. Use when the user wants multi-step, long-running, crash-safe, or human-in-the-loop agent work ('orchestrate agents', 'run a workflow', 'implement this and review it', 'keep iterating until tests pass', 'plan then build') or anything needing retries, approvals, replay, or evals across multiple AI steps. YOU (Claude) run Smithers on the user's behalf; it is not a GUI the human clicks. HARD RULE 0, if `SMITHERS_INSIDE_RUN` is set in your environment you are ALREADY a worker agent inside a Smithers node, so never invoke the Smithers CLI or MCP tools to launch or steer a run, just do the node's task directly with your ordinary tools; every rule below applies only when it is unset. HARD RULE 1, right-size the route FIRST, handle a most-trivial edit directly, run ANY clear single-goal ask through `smithers oneshot`, even a large repo-wide one (one strong agent one-shots up to roughly 300k tokens in a single run), and reserve a full workflow for work that genuinely needs ordered stages, durability, approvals, loops, or reuse; never author a multi-node workflow for a single-goal task, and neither task size nor context-window worries ever justify one. HARD RULE 2, run long-running / multi-step / background work through a durable Smithers workflow, NOT through Task/Agent subagents, /loop, or hand-written native Workflow scripts; the native Workflow tool has exactly ONE sanctioned use, launching the plugin's smithers-run.mjs mirror so the run shows live in /workflows. HARD RULE 3, when creating or editing workflow code, ALWAYS use https://smithers.sh/llms-full.txt as the API reference (fetch it first). A workflow that runs long, fans out, or pauses on approvals should get a live custom UI at .smithers/ui/<key>.tsx (composed from the smthrs/gateway-ui + smthrs/ui component libraries over the gateway-react hooks, never hand-rolled markup), launched with `smithers ui` so the human can watch; short linear runs are fine on `smithers monitor`.

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/smithers
curl -L https://claudskills.com/skills/smithers/SKILL.md \
  -o ~/.claude/skills/smithers/SKILL.md

@misc{smithers-2026,
  author    = {smithersai},
  title     = {Smithers [Claude Code skill]},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {ClaudSkills},
  url       = {https://claudskills.com/skills/smithers/}
}