Tandem skills

Pair-programming rules for coding agents. A system-prompt patch plus a small set of skills that push back on agentic autonomy and give you control back: fewer unprompted antics, more actual collaboration.

Install

pi install npm:pi-tandem

Philosophy

Modern coding agents lean toward autonomy: multi-file changes in one go, subagent fan-out, reinforced by the system prompts of popular harnesses (especially Claude Code). The usual result is a bloated clump of code that hopefully works - and reviewing it costs more than generating it saved, since you still have to read all of it. Tandem inverts this: keep changes small enough that each step is cheap to review, and prune misalignment early, before it compounds into slop. The result is both faster and higher-quality.

What's inside

• Pair-work prompt patch - nudges the agent toward:
  • fewer unprompted changes and unwelcome judgment calls
  • more check-ins with you as it goes, so you can follow along and steer early
  • toned-down nauseating sycophancy and "load bearing"-style LLMisms
• Skills, each just a short file, loaded on demand:
  • Research - verifies claims one at a time, with your go-ahead per step - a red herring or wrong conclusion gets caught while still cheap
  • Brainstorm - interviews you about the idea one question at a time, or rubber ducks while you think out loud, until you and the model get on the same page
  • Coding - "lazy senior" discipline: no speculative abstractions, deletion over addition, root-cause fixes, self-explanatory code over comment-peppering
  • Review - carefully reads whatever you hand it, like docs or code, checks with you on debatable stuff, and then reports actionable findings with a fix each
  • Pull requests - matches tone and length of the repo's recently merged PRs, proposes drafts before actually raising or updating a PR
  • Writing - interactive drafting for human readers: one paragraph at a time, and several takes instead of a single rewrite when you ask to rephrase
  • Learning language - kicks in only if you state that you are learning a language; background practice that stays out of the way of the work
• Interactive subagents - fresh-context workers you can steer and must approve; details in the Interactive subagents section
• Tool-specific instructions (gh, aws, jira, ...) - added only for tools actually installed, so nothing about a missing tool ever ends up in the prompt

Interactive subagents

In most harnesses a subagent is fire-and-forget: a one-shot call - prompt in, result out, no interaction while it runs - and the full result lands in the parent's context. Tandem keeps the point of the idea - a task runs in a fresh context and reports back, sparing the parent's context the intermediate steps - but drops the fire-and-forget part:

• the worker is a normal agent session with the same skills: you can watch it work and talk to it mid-task
• nothing flows back until you check and approve the result in the worker's chat; only the result - usually far smaller than the worker's full transcript - is loaded into the parent's context

The workflow needs the main session to run inside tmux or paseo. To start a worker, tell the current agent "use a subagent" or "do it in a fresh session": it spawns a new session using the available mechanism - a tmux window, or a parallel paseo agent - and hands it a fully self-contained task; the worker never sees the parent session's history. Workers can spawn subagents of their own, so the delegation nests.

The idea first shipped in pi-supergsd, Pi-only, with tasks running as branches in the Pi session tree instead of separate sessions.

Recommended tools

The plugin notices which CLI tools are actually installed on your machine, and for each one it finds, adds a short note telling the model that the tool is available and recommended to use. Installing these gets you significantly more out of this package:

• gh - GitHub CLI: repos, issues, PRs, releases, workflows
• html2text (Python, e.g. via pipx install html2text) - read web pages as markdown instead of raw markup
• lynx - plain-text fallback for web pages when the Python html2text is not installed
• pdftotext (poppler) - extract text from PDFs
• a Chromium-based browser (Brave, Chromium, Chrome, Edge) - headless-render fallback for JS-heavy or bot-blocked pages
• pandoc - convert docx/odt/rtf to markdown
• osascript (macOS only) - drive the user's real browser sessions via AppleScript
• jira, aws, saml2aws - if your workflow includes them
• tmux or paseo - run the main session inside one of these to enable interactive subagents

Attribution

The "lazy senior" part of the coding skill is adapted from ponytail by DietrichGebert (MIT).

The brainstorm skill's interview method (facts vs. decisions, one question at a time, throwaway probes) is inspired by ideas from the brainstorming skill in superpowers by obra and the grilling skill in skills by mattpocock (both MIT).

License

MIT. See LICENSE.