conductor — goal → ordered plan of capabilities

The router, generalised: not "which model tier?" but "given this goal, which capabilities, in which order, and what stays local?". The plan is the product — you (or the agent) execute it; the Conductor never runs anything itself.

python -m skills.conductor.cli "test my desktop app and report crashes"
python -m skills.conductor.cli "reduce token cost and deploy on my project" --json

# Execute the plan (read-only steps run; mutating/cloud steps are gated):
python -m skills.conductor.cli "audit my project and report metrics" --execute
python -m skills.conductor.cli "..." --execute --dry-run      # preview, runs nothing
python -m skills.conductor.cli "..." --execute --confirm      # also run gated steps

How it plans

1. Curate — picks the capabilities relevant to the goal ([[capabilities]] curator, local lexical match, 0 tokens).
2. Order — sorts them by the system's layers (SENSE → DECIDE → ACT → REMEMBER → GOVERN → DEPLOY): understand → decide → act → remember.
3. Annotate — each step gets a concrete command, a local/cloud flag, and the reason it's there.
4. Estimate — the goal's effort tier ([[auto_router]]) tells you whether any step's reasoning will escalate to the cloud.

Output: an ordered list of steps, 0 cloud tokens to produce. It composes the module collection into a coherent plan per goal — the conductor of the system.

Executing the plan

The plan can be run, not just read. The executor classifies every step:

• safe — read-only analysis (directives_audit, metrics, infra_advisor, checkup, cluster, llm_backends) → runs unattended, 0 cloud tokens.
• gated — mutates state, generates artifacts, or escalates to the cloud → runs only with --confirm / confirm=true.
• needs_args — the command still has an unfilled <placeholder> → never runs.

--dry-run classifies everything and runs nothing (a preview). A failing step yields a non-zero exit so CI can react. The runner is injectable, so the behaviour is fully unit-tested without spawning subprocesses.

Exposed via [[llm_mcp]] as conduct (plan) and execute_plan (plan + run safe steps). Built on [[capabilities]], [[auto_router]]; pairs with the [[control_loop]] (measure savings → adapt the routing).