Systems Lab

Agent skill

away-brief

Give the owner one page when they come back from sleep, a meeting or a long run: what got done, what is stuck, what waits for their answer, and what it cost in quota.

activeSelf-containedActs undeclared500 words

Filed under Calls, demos and discovery.

From sno-ai/sno-station-skills · 31 skill entries · 264 · pushed 2026-10-08

What it does when it runs

Give the owner one page when they come back from sleep, a meeting or a long run: what got done, what is stuck, what waits for their answer, and what it cost in quota. Use when the owner asks what happened while they were away, wants a status page, or when you finish a long stretch of work and must report it.

Automated analysis of the skill and the 3 files bundled beside it. A skill’s own description is written to be selected by an agent, so it describes the job and not the dependencies.

Keys and connectors you must supply
None found.
Hosts it reaches
No third-party host appears in the skill or its bundled files.
Tool permissions it declares
No allowed-tools in the frontmatter. It does act, so it runs under whatever permissions your session already grants.
Actions present in the files
shellwrites files

Ask about away-brief

Opens your assistant with this page's verified links already in the prompt.

Is this safe to install?ClaudeChatGPT
Adapt it to my stackClaudeChatGPT
What else do I need for it to workClaudeChatGPT
Rather ask a human? Talk to Cheetah
git clone --depth 1 --filter=blob:none --sparse https://github.com/sno-ai/sno-station-skills.git /tmp/sno-station-skills
git -C /tmp/sno-station-skills sparse-checkout set "skills/H-reporting-and-visibility/away-brief/skill"
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/away-brief
cp -R "/tmp/sno-station-skills/skills/H-reporting-and-visibility/away-brief/skill/." ~/.claude/skills/away-brief/

Picked up without a restart. A project skill of the same name is shadowed by your personal one. For one repository only, swap ~/.claude/skills for .claude/skills. Claude Code docs ↗

The folder is the same in every client that implements the format — 46 of them — so if yours is not above, only the destination changes.

Reproduced in full from sno-ai/sno-station-skills/blob/0451ca25ab9c70aac62162becbec9a4e1e936d56/skills/H-reporting-and-visibility/away-brief/skill/SKILL.md, which is licensed APACHE-2.0 (repository). 500 words, 7 headings.

away-brief

sno away-brief run reads what already exists and prints one page of at most 60 lines. It changes nothing except its own list of quota readings, and Reach, which may note that it has seen the cards that the inbox read listed (it never moves, accepts or finishes them).

## Done       new commits, charters delivered since the cutoff (with how many checks are proven),
              progress records that finished or are still going
## Stuck      charters not finished (with the numbers of the checks not yet proven), progress records
              with tasks left that nobody has touched for two hours
## Needs you  Reach cards of type question or decision waiting in the inbox
## Spend      your heartbeats, and each vendor's quota now with the change since the last reading

A source it cannot read prints not read: <what> -> <why> and the rest of the page still prints. Each section has its own share of the 60 lines; items beyond it are replaced by an and N more not shown line, so a long Done list never pushes out what waits for the owner or the quota.

Prerequisites: bash 4+, GNU coreutils, git and jq. It uses sno deliver-proof (the deliver skill) to count proofs, sno reach inbox, sno heartbeat --list and sno subscription-quota-check when they are installed.

Use

  1. Run sno away-brief run --since 12h in the project's git folder. Change --since to the time the owner left (8h, 2d, or a date). Add --repo DIR for each other repository and --charters DIR for folders that hold charters or progress records outside those repositories. Add --as <your seat> (or set SNO_REACH_ADDR) so the inbox is read.
  2. Read the page and tell the owner the three things that matter most, in plain words: what is finished, what is blocked and why, and what needs their answer. Keep the page's evidence paths so they can open the file. Do not add work that is not on the page.
  3. Quota: a reading shows usage now, not spend. When the owner is about to leave, run sno away-brief mark once; it stores a reading, so the next page can show what was spent since. Without an earlier reading the page says so instead of guessing.

What the page can and cannot say

  • "Done" is only what is in git, in a delivered charter, or in a finished progress record. Work that was never committed or recorded does not appear.
  • "Stuck" is a charter whose recorded proofs are missing or failing, or a progress record (written by sno handoff-checkpoint) with tasks left and no update for two hours. An agent that is busy but does not write records looks quiet.
  • "Needs you" is only the seat you name. Questions sent to other seats are not shown.
  • The change in quota compares two readings of the same window; if the window reset in between, the page says so instead of showing a negative number.

Files bundled with it

These load only when the skill asks for them, so they cost nothing until it runs.

Other skills for the same job

Different authors, same problem. Matched on the words in the skill name, across every library in the catalogue except this one.

Need help setting it up?

This page tells you what away-brief does and what it needs. Cheetah builds the agent setup it runs inside: data, CRM, sequencing and the guardrails.

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The directory stays free. There is nothing gated behind this.