Tools & skills

The Management layer is operated through two surfaces:

• vrg-* command-line tools — the mechanical operations (create an epic, link a task, run the audit), maintained in vergil-tooling.
• Skills — the agent-facing workflows that compose those tools into a process (orchestrate an epic, capture intake, groom the queue), maintained in the Claude Code plugin, vergil-claude-plugin.

This page explains how they fit together and who drives what. The dry, per-command reference — every flag of every tool — lives in the repositories where the code does; this is the story, not the man page.

Who drives what

The dividing line is accountability. The speed limit is human comprehension, not code generation — so agents do the development, and humans own the irreversible, outward-facing steps.

Driven by the agent (runs as the user identity)	Driven by the human
Participating in brainstorm / pushback / alignment	The judgment calls inside those interactive stages
Authoring specs and plans; implementing tasks	Submitting the pull request (vrg-submit-pr)
Commits and PR preparation / hand-off	Reviewing and merging
Read-only audits and dry-runs	Post-merge finalize (vrg-finalize-pr)
Filing intake, epics, tasks, links	Write-gated ops: migration --apply, audit --close

An agent never merges and never opens a PR itself: it prepares the change and hands off, and a human takes it across the line.

The tools, by role

Authoring & structure

• vrg-epic-create (mint an epic in .github)
• vrg-adhoc-epic (ensure a repo's ad-hoc epic exists)
• vrg-issue-create (create a task, born linked under an epic)
• vrg-epic-link / vrg-epic-move / vrg-epic-unlink (manage the epic↔task relationship)

Intake

• vrg-triage-create (file an intake issue into .github; --kind triage|idea|research)

Lifecycle

• vrg-epic-rollup (close a finite epic when its last task closes — event-driven)
• vrg-finalize-pr (merge + post-merge cleanup — human)

Reporting & enforcement

• vrg-roadmap (the open-epic roadmap)
• vrg-epic-audit (drift and invariant violations — read-only, with a human-gated --close)
• vrg-adhoc-migrate (the one-time relocation of the legacy standing epics — complete; the standing alias is retired, so ad-hoc is the only perpetual variant)

To relocate a finite epic into its correct home (.github), move the issue with vrg-gh issue transfer and re-link its tasks with vrg-epic-link.

Pull-request flow

• vrg-commit (standards-compliant commits)
• vrg-pr-workflow report-ready (records the PR hand-off)
• vrg-submit-pr (open the PR — human-run)

The vrg-gh and vrg-git wrappers sit under all of this, enforcing the allow-lists and selecting the right identity; raw git/gh are blocked in agent sessions.

The skills, by role

• epic-create — the outer orchestrator of the workflow: brainstorm → epic → spec → pushback → plan → alignment → docs PR → file tasks.
• triage-capture — the lossless net: file an intake issue with near-zero friction.
• triage-review — the periodic grooming pass that drains the intake queue into the model.
• migrate-repo — onboard a repository's pre-framework backlog into the epic/task model.
• issue-implement — the agent implements a single issue end-to-end and hands the PR off.
• pr-watch — the agent monitors an open PR through CI and review, reconciling until it is mergeable.

Together, the tools give the mechanical guarantees and the skills give the process on top of them — which is exactly why the story belongs here, in one place, while each tool's and action's mechanical detail stays in its own repo.