Overview

The Agent Skills are the part of the stack that your coding agent reads. They follow the open Agent Skills format and are packaged as a plugin for Claude Code and Codex, in the terminal or in their desktop apps.

The lightcone pluginCopy Anchor Link

The lightcone plugin works with you on a whole Lightcone project: it scopes the analysis with you, runs it with lc, diagnoses failures, keeps the report in sync with the results, and publishes. It has two skills:

You rarely need to call them. Agents load a skill on their own when the task matches it: the lightcone skill when you start, resume, run, debug or publish an analysis, or ask to run or fix one in a directory that holds an astra.yaml; the astra skill when the agent reads or writes an ASTRA file. The Quick Start installs the plugin.

How the skills behaveCopy Anchor Link

• The scientific choices stay yours. A new analysis starts with an interview, not with code. Candidate decisions, findings and evidence are written to astra.yaml, where you can review them, and the conversation keeps to a summary.
• Nothing is installed without asking. In an interactive session the agent offers the command and waits for your answer. Only in a headless run, where no one can answer, does it act, and then it says what it changed.
• Compute beyond your own machine needs a yes. The agent starts a local cluster when there is something to run, and tells you. A remote allocation, several nodes or GPUs can spend your hours and queue time, so it shows you the plan first.
• Everything runs through lc. The agent never calls the container runtime, the sandbox or a job scheduler itself, so every output carries its run record.
• Quotes are checked. A quote from a paper is verified against the PDF before it enters the specification; one that can't be verified is dropped, not cited.

Pinned tool versionsCopy Anchor Link

The skills drive two command-line tools, each pinned to the version they are written against:

Each plugin update can move these pins. When the lc pin moves past the version you have, the plugin notices at the start of the next session and your agent offers the install command.