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Aider drones get a skills roster

· 2 min read
Carefree Investments LLC
Anchor maintainers

Yesterday's Aider platform scaffold shipped AIDER.md — a brief that teaches a drone session to run /work and nothing else. It didn't say much about why nothing else: an operator typing /draft or /review at a drone just got a one-line redirect buried in prose. anchor --platform aider now also writes a small skills-index.md that makes that roster explicit.

One skill, one roster​

platforms/aider/skills-index.md ships alongside AIDER.md (both loaded via .aider.conf.yml's read: list) and lists, in one table, the only skill a drone runs — /work, with its optional slug and --list form — followed by every other Anchor command (/draft, /review, /audit, /optimize, …) marked queen-bee-only. If a ready plan's own Steps call for a narrow slice of one of those (a test run, a one-line CHANGELOG entry), the index says to do that narrow thing rather than pull in the full skill.

AIDER.md itself didn't need to change: it already carries a condensed /work procedure inline rather than pointing at the canonical skill file, because Aider's small local models have no way to fetch a file into context on demand — the procedure has to already be sitting in the chat. The index is a companion, not a replacement.

What ships​

read:
  - AIDER.md
  - platforms/aider/skills-index.md

is now the default .aider.conf.yml.example for anchor --platform aider. Existing Aider scaffolds pick it up on the next anchor --platform aider re-scaffold.