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Working With Agents

Absurd works well with coding agents because workflow state lives in Postgres and can be inspected with absurdctl.

The easiest way to make that usable for agents is to install the bundled Absurd skill. The skill gives the agent a compact debugging playbook for common operations such as:

  • discovering queues
  • listing recent tasks
  • dumping a task or run
  • spawning work
  • retrying failed work
  • emitting events to wake sleeping tasks

Install the Bundled Skill

By default, absurdctl install-skill installs into .agents/skills:

absurdctl install-skill

That creates:

.agents/skills/absurd/SKILL.md

If you want to install into a different skills directory, pass it explicitly:

absurdctl install-skill .pi/skills
absurdctl install-skill ~/.pi/agent/skills

Use --force to overwrite an existing installed copy:

absurdctl install-skill .pi/skills --force

Common choices are:

  • .agents/skills — generic project-local agent skills
  • .pi/skills — project-local skills for pi
  • ~/.pi/agent/skills — user-global pi skills

How Agents Use It

Once installed, compatible agents can discover the absurd skill and load it on request. The skill is designed to steer the agent towards absurdctl first, so it inspects queue and task state before digging through application code.

A typical workflow looks like this:

absurdctl list-queues
absurdctl list-tasks --queue=default --limit=20
absurdctl dump-task --task-id=<task-id>

From there the agent can usually decide whether to:

  • retry a failed task
  • emit an event to wake a sleeping task
  • spawn a reproducer task
  • inspect the application code for the task implementation