Delegate bounded coding tasks to Mistral Vibe and review

Hands a bounded coding task to a separate implementer - the Mistral Vibe CLI (vibe) - then lets you review what it produced and land it yourself. You write the brief and own the judgment; Vibe does the typing in its own session; you verify and commit. The loop needs only a shell command and file access, so any comparable orchestrator can drive it.

The loop is five steps. Steps 1, 4, and 5 require judgment; 2 and 3 are mechanical:

1. Write the brief. Vibe sees only the text sent to it plus what it can inspect in the workspace - no chat history or shared context. Include the goal, current state, what to change, what to leave untouched, the project's actual gates, and a report contract. Tell Vibe not to commit, and keep one task per brief. Default mode cannot approve most shell commands headlessly, so the orchestrator runs the gates itself - Vibe is asked to run them only when the human explicitly authorized --full-access.
2. Dispatch via the bundled helper, which wraps Vibe's headless --prompt mode, captures the structured event stream, and writes result.json. The child process's cwd pins the workspace; the relay writes artifacts under the system temp dir by default and never commits.
3. Wait for completion. The helper blocks until Vibe finishes - run it with the orchestrator's background-command facility, or background it in the shell and poll for result.json. A pre-run usage error exits 2 and writes no result; a missing vibe binary exits 127 and writes status: "vibe_unavailable"; the watchdog writes status: "timeout"; terminating the relay on POSIX writes status: "aborted" after stopping Vibe's process tree. Trust process state and the working tree over a progress display - completion means the process exited and result.json exists.
4. Review - do not trust the self-report. Treat Vibe's final message and gate claims as claims: re-run the project's gates yourself, read the diff against the brief starting with touchedFiles, run relevant guard skills if installed, and round-trip migrations plus grep for dangling references after removals or renames.
5. Land it. The implementer edits the working tree; the orchestrator commits, only after the gates pass and the diff holds. If rework is needed, send a delta brief with --resume-last or --session <id>, then review again.

Use it to delegate a bounded coding task to Mistral Vibe and review the diff afterward, or when explicitly asked to delegate to this implementer.

Do NOT use it when the task is small enough to do inline, or when the vibe CLI is not installed or authenticated.

Prerequisites: install uv first, then Mistral Vibe via uv tool install mistral-vibe; configure an API key with vibe --setup or the MISTRAL_API_KEY environment variable; confirm vibe --version succeeds; and work in, or point --cd at, the target git repository.

node "<skill-dir>/scripts/relay.mjs" --brief brief.txt --cd /path/to/repo

Flags: --max-turns <n> limits turns for cost control, --max-price <usd> and --max-tokens <n> set an indicative price threshold or token cap, --plan-only runs a planning/read-only pass, --full-access grants unrestricted shell and tool access (requires explicit human authorization), and --resume-last or --session <id> continue a session with a delta brief.

In --prompt mode the relay always sets Vibe's agent profile explicitly: the default passes --agent accept-edits for normal implementation, where built-in file edits are approved; --plan-only passes --agent plan for read-only review, exploration, or planning; --full-access passes --agent auto-approve for explicitly authorized runs that need arbitrary shell/tools. Default mode lets Vibe edit files inside the target worktree, but approval-gated shell commands - including most project gates - are denied headlessly, so the orchestrator runs the gates. --full-access disables Vibe's tool approvals and permits arbitrary shell/tool execution under the user account, and should be used only with explicit human authorization. --trust is always passed to prevent interactive directory-trust prompts in headless runs - it is not a sandbox and does not grant tool permissions. touchedFiles and the diff should always be inspected after a run.

Orchestrating agents or developers who want to delegate a bounded coding task to a separate Mistral Vibe implementer session while keeping review and commit authority themselves.