What problem does it solve?
CAO providers infer agent state by pattern-matching the rendered terminal screen, so a crashed or stalled CLI can still report an idle or processing status. This Skill prevents reporting progress on sessions that are already dead by requiring output-based corroboration before any status claim.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Two-Signal Verification: Always cross-check the reported status against the output tail, and trust the output when the two disagree.
- Dead-Session Detection: Recognize concrete failure signatures such as shell prompts, CLI usage errors, API errors, and session-ended markers regardless of reported status.
- Provider Reliability Guidance: Interpret detection quirks for kiro_cli, hermes, opencode_cli, claude_code, and codex, and verify a provider with a throwaway session before depending on it.
- Use Case: A send to a worker session times out and the status reads idle. Instead of reporting completion, you read the output tail, find a bare shell prompt, and correctly report the session as dead rather than finished.
Quick Start
Check whether my CAO session named build-worker is actually alive by comparing its status with its recent output before reporting progress.
