Forming an OpenRig Mental Model
Gives an agent a fast orientation to OpenRig's rigs, pods, seats, and skill loading
- Repository
- mvschwarz/openrig
- Stars
- 8,553
- Licence
- Apache-2.0
- Files
- 1 file
What it does
This is a guide that teaches an AI agent how the OpenRig system is organized before it acts. When an agent is unsure what a term like rig, pod, seat, or topology means, or how its context and skills arrive, this skill gives it a condensed model: OpenRig manages groups of cooperating agents as a single system, saves their state on shutdown, and restores their conversations on startup. It is an on-ramp that points to the official docs rather than replacing them.
Great for
- Developers or agents newly placed into an OpenRig rig who need to orient quickly
- Agents returning to an OpenRig project after time away and unsure of current terminology
- Teams onboarding new agent seats who want a shared vocabulary for rigs, pods, and edges
Skip it if
- People who just want to run or install OpenRig; the operational guide is a separate sibling skill (openrig-user) and this one only explains concepts
- Anyone expecting it to change files or execute commands by itself, since the visible SKILL.md is descriptive text only and does not replace the canonical docs
Try asking
- “I just booted into this seat and don't know how the rig fits together. What am I looking at?”
- “What's the difference between a pod and a member in this rig?”
- “What class of rig am I in, and what does that mean for my supervision?”
- “How do skills reach me at boot, and where does my context come from?”
Install in 3 steps
- 1
Download the skill
The ZIP contains the 1 original files, the Apache-2.0 licence and an attribution note.
forming-an-openrig-mental-model.zip - 2
Add it to your agent
Claude Code (all projects)
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && unzip forming-an-openrig-mental-model.zip -d ~/.claude/skills/Claude Code / Agent SDK (this project only)
mkdir -p .claude/skills && unzip forming-an-openrig-mental-model.zip -d .claude/skills/Claude apps (web/desktop): Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload skill, and choose the ZIP.
- 3
Ask for the task
No special command needed — the agent reads the skill's description and loads it when your request matches. Try one of the prompts above.
Get better results
- Use this skill at the start of a session, then read the canonical OpenRig reference docs for depth.
- Run rig whoami --json to ground your understanding in your actual rig, pod, and peers rather than relying only on the general model.
- The SKILL.md file is truncated in the provided source before its section on how skills load, so verify that section directly in the repository.
What's inside
- SKILL.md
Redistributed unmodified from mvschwarz/openrig under the Apache-2.0 licence. The assessment was drafted with AI from the skill's files on 2026-10-29. Skills can instruct your agent to run code — read SKILL.md and any scripts before installing.