If you've been building with AI coding agents over the past year, you've probably discovered Agent Skills. The premise is elegant: package your workflows as portable, version-controlled skill folders that any agent can pick up and use. Write once, use everywhere.
I've been all-in on it. I opensourced ram-agent-skills — a curated collection of 15 skills blending the Google Conductor workflow with Matt Pocock's agentic patterns. Skills like conductor, grill-me, to-prd, and tdd that I use every day.
But after months of real-world usage, I hit a wall. And I think everyone building serious skills will hit it too.
The problem: skills can't express their human-in-the-loop needs
Here's what I mean. Take the conductor skill. It's a structured development workflow — it generates a spec, gets approval, builds an implementation plan, gets approval again, implements phase by phase, and asks for manual verification before each commit.
