# operate

> Release it, watch it, recover it — for the night nobody is awake. Installs as an agent skill.

`operate` runs what's already shipped: release and rollout, environments and secrets, CI/CD,
infrastructure, observability, SLOs and alerting, incidents, recoverability, production security,
cost-to-serve, decommissioning, and dependency lifecycle. It is the only skill in the family whose
subject is a running system rather than an artifact — every sibling produces something and hands it
on; `operate` receives an artifact and owns what exists afterwards, indefinitely. Its flagship move
is grading a rollout result as evidence with a class (`observed`/`inferred`/`not_tested`/`blocked`)
and a population — a canary is `observed` only for the cohort it reached, never extended past its
conditions — and separating deploy from release from launch. `SKILL.md` is a faceted router: one
primary job (of 12, e.g. `release-and-rollout` ⭐) composes with at most one base surface (of 6:
managed-platform, self-managed-cloud, serverless-edge, mobile-release, data-pipeline, ai-system) plus
an additive `surface-org-scale` overlay when a rota, role separation, or change-approval process
actually exists — read only the two or three references the request needs, never the whole
20-reference pack. The default reader is one person, or a small team, on a managed platform, with no
rota; org-scale assumptions are added, not assumed — a deliberate inversion of the published SRE
canon. Claude Code is the reference host; it's plain Agent Skills format (agentskills.io), so it
installs on Codex, Cursor, Antigravity, opencode, Grok Build, and Hermes too.

## Install

- npm/skills.sh: `npx skills add gabros20/operate-skill`
- Clone + installer (per-host targets: claude | codex | cursor | antigravity | opencode | grok | hermes | agents | all): `git clone https://github.com/gabros20/operate-skill && cd operate-skill && ./install.sh codex`
- Manual copy: `cp -R skills/operate ~/.claude/skills/operate`

## Docs

- [README.md](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gabros20/operate-skill/main/README.md): overview, install, workflow, and repository map.
- [skills/operate/SKILL.md](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gabros20/operate-skill/main/skills/operate/SKILL.md): runtime router, workflow, artifact contract, and completion rules.
- [docs/installation.md](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gabros20/operate-skill/main/docs/installation.md): installation and verification by client.
- [docs/usage.md](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gabros20/operate-skill/main/docs/usage.md): activation boundary, routes, outputs, and completion.
- [docs/recipes.md](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gabros20/operate-skill/main/docs/recipes.md): representative starting prompts.

## Reference inventory (`skills/operate/references/`)

Jobs (12):
- `release-and-rollout.md` ⭐ — **flagship.** deploy≠release≠launch; what each rollout mechanism does not establish; abort criteria written first; the peeking problem
- `environments-and-configuration.md` — environment strategy that earns its cost, rotation over storage, pinning anything that can change underneath you
- `delivery-pipeline.md` — build once and promote; CI is production; SLSA/SBOM/signing; DORA with its report year attached
- `infrastructure-provisioning.md` — declarative + reconciled, the emergency-intervention tension, the licence-and-liveness check
- `observability.md` — USE/RED/Golden and which applies where; cardinality as the cost driver; three pillars shipped as contested
- `slo-and-alerting.md` — burn-rate windows including the slow-burn ticket row; page only on user-visible harm; error-budget policy at n=1
- `incident-response.md` — command roles and their collapse at n=1; severity by user impact; root cause shipped as contested
- `recoverability.md` — restore drills over backups; the RTO validity envelope; what the platform does not do for you
- `production-security-posture.md` — posture as an ongoing SLA, deploy-identity least privilege, backups as a ransomware control
- `capacity-and-cost.md` — cost-to-serve per unit of value; autoscaling is not a cost control; the agent circuit-breaker spread
- `decommissioning.md` — sunset as an owned stage — evidence nothing depends on it, the reversibility window
- `dependency-lifecycle.md` — withdrawal and substitution; notice periods as a purchasable property

Surfaces (6 + 1 additive) and handoff:
- `surface-managed-platform.md` (default) · `surface-self-managed-cloud.md` · `surface-serverless-edge.md` ·
  `surface-mobile-release.md` · `surface-data-pipeline.md` · `surface-ai-system.md`
- `surface-org-scale.md` — additive overlay: rota sizing, role separation in incidents, error-budget policy as a contract between parties, change management with an audit trail
- `handoff.md` — what this skill consumes and emits, and the `handoff.yaml` companion's shape

## Optional

- [Visual guide](https://operate-skill.vercel.app): the router, the release-and-rollout flagship, and the full reference map on one page.