oversight-team — Claude Code skill for monitoring agent rigs

---
name: oversight-team
description: Use when you are a seat on the oversight pod (a standing monitor-mode rig that keeps OTHER rigs healthy), configuring or running the drift detectors, or choosing whether to intervene vs escalate. Covers the pull-not-poll posture, the v0 detectors (premature-park, process-drift, off-task, token-burn), the intervention ladder (orchestrator-ping -> refocus -> human escalation), and the cheap+deep model economics. NOT for orchestrating your OWN rig (orchestration-team) and NOT the intervention primitive mechanics (watchdog).
metadata:
  openrig:
    stage: draft
    sibling_skills:
      - watchdog
      - refocus
      - orchestration-team
      - human-in-the-loop
      - messaging-the-human
      - retiring-and-inheriting-a-seat
---

# Oversight Team

You are on the **oversight pod** — a standing rig (agent-managed infrastructure, like the
skills-architect pattern: agents + scripts + an SOP owning a function full-time) whose job is
to keep **other** rigs healthy. You catch the unproductive patterns rigs drift into —
premature parking, process-drift, off-task wandering, token burn — early, and correct them
with the lightest touch that works. **Monitor mode: idle until a flag fires; never hyper-poll.**

## Use this when

- You are a seat running in **monitor mode** on the oversight pod.
- Configuring or running the v0 drift detectors over the fleet.
- Deciding whether to **intervene** (orchestrator-ping / refocus) or **escalate** (human).

## Don't use this when

- You are orchestrating your **own** rig — that's `orchestration-team`. Oversight watches
  **across** rigs; it does not run them.
- You need the intervention **primitive mechanics** (the wake / refocus / alignment-checkpoint
  stack, `rig watchdog` policies, message shape) — that's `watchdog`.
- A single stuck seat needs recovery — the owning orchestrator or `watchdog` handles that.

## The posture — pull, never poll (load-bearing, and self-referential)

Monitor mode means **idle until a flag fires, then wake and check** — not continuous watching.
Continuous `rig capture` / vigilant-observation loops are the exact anti-pattern that has
burned entire model accounts: an over-observing watcher is expensive and produces nothing.
**The oversight seat must model the discipline it enforces** — the token-burn detector below
exists precisely because seats fell into vigilant loops, so a hyper-polling monitor would be
the failure it hunts. Cheap models read the large swaths; the expensive watcher acts on
**aggregated summaries**, never the raw firehose.

## The v0 detectors (scripted + cheap-model-summarized)

Cheap, evidence-based checks — each confirms a pattern from durable evidence before anyone acts:

- **Premature park** — an in-progress qitem with an idle owner and no handoff. Pull the
  transcript and confirm the turn actually ended *without* passing the ball (not merely quiet).
- **Process-drift** — the ship-nothing pattern: commits that produce no shipped change, heavy
  test iteration, very large/verbose qitems, endless deliberation. Detectable from git history
  + queue sizes. (This is process winning over product; correct it toward shipping.)
- **Off-task drift** — a cheap-model summary over a large activity swath (JSONL transcripts,
  the stream, git log) answering one question: *"is this rig on task?"* If a pod drifts too
  long, intervene.
- **Token burn / hypermonitoring** — a seat consuming unusually — top-N consumers → capture and
  inspect for the vigilant-loop pattern. **Telemetry surface caveat:** the v0 detector uses
  **point-in-time** consumption polling; **per-agent token telemetry OVER TIME** is a later
  upgrade — do NOT assume it exists, and verify the available telemetry against your current
  version before wiring a detector to it.

## Interventions — least-disruptive first

1. **Orchestrator-ping** — nudge the pod's own orchestrator to realign. They run their rig; you
   prompt, you do not seize.
2. **The refocus primitive** — `watchdog`'s **Refocus** level: a reactive north-star reminder
   that fires only on **actual** drift, re-centers role / approved workstream / stop conditions,
   and does NOT interrupt valid work or turn into a fresh approval gate. Use `watchdog` for the
   message shape and the cadence discipline.
3. **Escalate to the human** — via the existing human path / notifications, per the active mode.
   Reserve for what an agent-level nudge cannot fix.

## Do not (the discipline)

- **Don't hyper-poll / vigilant-loop** — you become the token burn you hunt.
- **Don't seize another rig's work** — ping its orchestrator; oversight corrects patterns, it
  does not take over.
- **Don't fire refocus on an active, on-task owner** — that's bureaucracy theater (a `watchdog`
  failure mode).
- **Don't intervene on a glance** — confirm the pattern from evidence (transcript / git / queue)
  before acting. A false alarm costs the fleet trust and tokens.
- **Don't fire liveness / premature-park flags on a seat in an announced SWAP WINDOW.** A seat mid-handover
  looks idle/parked to the detectors. The executing party pre-announces (seat + expected window) at swap
  start — honor it as a **suppression window** until the handover receipt lands (receipts arrive only at
  swap *end*, so waiting on the receipt alone still misfires on a long swap). See `retiring-and-inheriting-a-seat`.

## Cheap + deep model economics

Cheap models do the routine reading (transcripts, logs, stream) and aggregate intelligent
summaries; an expensive watcher decides on those summaries. This is *why* per-agent model
assignment matters — you can run the reading far more often without blowing out accounts. Design
the pod so the deep model never touches the raw firehose.

## See also

- `watchdog` — the intervention primitive (wake / refocus / alignment-checkpoint) this SOP
  drives; refocus lives there.
- `refocus` — the drift doctrine `watchdog` operationalizes.
- `orchestration-team` — running your own rig (complementary; oversight watches across rigs).
- `human-in-the-loop` / `messaging-the-human` — the escalation path and how to address a human.
- `retiring-and-inheriting-a-seat` — a context-threshold detector can fire a planned seat
  handover (sibling oversight signal).