Subcontractor brief — your name is on their work Agent Skill

Use when another developer, contractor, or agency is being brought onto the user's client work, or when subcontracted work is coming back…

Context cost
1.3k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 5.0 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
MITthe author’s own terms
Last change
—no release on file
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Use when another developer, contractor, or agency is being brought onto the user's client work, or when subcontracted work is coming back to be merged, deployed, invoiced, or reported to the client — especially under deadline pressure, fatigue, or when the subcontractor is trusted and says it is done.

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

collaboration

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md5.0 kB · preview
--- name: subcontractor-brief ---
6# Subcontractor brief — your name is on their work
7
8The client bought your judgment, not the subcontractor's. Their "done and tested" is a **claim**, not a verification; unreviewed, it becomes your verified deliverable and your liability. Past good work sets your risk tolerance; it never replaces checking this specific piece. Nothing reaches the client that you have not checked yourself.
9
10## Procedure
11
12### 1. Write the brief before they start
13Name the deliverable, the branch, and what is **out** of scope. Write the review gate in as an acceptance condition, not a courtesy. Price their piece with quote-job; hold the boundary against client scope with scope-check.
14
15### 2. Grant access without sharing your credentials
16Their own named accounts, least privilege, expiry. Never your SSH key, your logins, or a raw secrets file — a shared .env hands over every credential you hold, permanently and unrevocably. No deploy rights to client-facing environments. dev-handoff for context, client-onboarding for issuing credentials properly. Bad access that already exists gets flagged in writing immediately — that flag never blocks starting the review, it rides alongside it. Name the fix (rotate those secrets, reissue least-privilege access) as required before their next work ships, and leave executing it to the user; never change credentials yourself.
17
18### 3. Keep the communication boundary
19They report to you; you report to the client — a side channel makes you responsible for statements you never made. If they have spoken to the client directly, name it back as a boundary correction: one factual line, no blame, fixing the channel going forward. That correction does not pause work in flight, but anything they told the client that you have not verified gets corrected with the client before your gate closes.
20
21### 4. Run the review gate yourself
22Read the diff line by line. Independently reproduce what they claim — your own run, at the level the client sees it. bug-triage if the work was a fix, deploy-verify after any deploy. Under deadline or exhaustion the gate is **scoped down** (diff read plus one targeted smoke test), never skipped. If even that will not fit before a hard external deadline, the work does not ship: tell the client before the deadline that it is unverified and what that risks, then let them choose — move the date, ship the last known-good version, or accept unverified work in writing.
23
24### 5. Separate the irreversible actions
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md817 words
Files1
LicenceMIT
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈90
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
1,160
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
0.63%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 6% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

1.3k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Middling. Fine to keep on in a project where you use it weekly, worth unloading in one where you never do.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

1 file, 5.0 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md5.0 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 1 file you can review in full before installing. The MIT licence covers the templates and examples as well as the instructions.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Subcontractor brief — your name is on their work · 1.3k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/subcontractor-brief-your-name-is-on-their-work/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/subcontractor-brief-your-name-is-on-their-work" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/subcontractor-brief-your-name-is-on-their-work ] || { mv .claude/skills/subcontractor-brief-your-name-is-on-their-work "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/subcontractor-brief-your-name-is-on-their-work" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/subcontractor-brief-your-name-is-on-their-work"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add calelamb/subcontractor-brief-your-name-is-on-their-work

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/subcontractor-brief-your-name-is-on-their-work/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/subcontractor-brief-your-name-is-on-their-work/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/subcontractor-brief-your-name-is-on-their-work" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/subcontractor-brief-your-name-is-on-their-work ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/subcontractor-brief-your-name-is-on-their-work "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/subcontractor-brief-your-name-is-on-their-work" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/subcontractor-brief-your-name-is-on-their-work" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/subcontractor-brief-your-name-is-on-their-work/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where. It appears as subcontractor-brief in Gemini CLI, Codex, Copilot and Grok (its own name); Claude Code lists it by the folder name, subcontractor-brief-your-name-is-on-their-work.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Versionnot versioned
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencecalelamb/subcontractor-brief-your-name-is-on-their-work

Versions

Its author publishes no version number, so there is nothing here to pin to: what you install is the folder as it stands today. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

Pinning

Nothing to pin to: this skill carries no version number of its own. What you install is what the folder holds on the day you install it.

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