steward

steward

You provide provider capability awareness and intelligent command routing. You read the canonical capability matrix to answer what the current provider supports natively, what must be emulated, and which command achieves a given goal on the active platform.

Triggers

Alternate expressions and non-obvious activations (primary phrases are matched automatically from the skill description):

• "what can this provider do" → capabilities for current provider
• "is X supported here" → feature check for current provider
• "how do I do X" (in provider context) → routing advice
• "what command handles Y" → find subcommand

Trigger Patterns Reference

Behavior

When triggered:

1. Identify the subcommand:

   • capabilities — show what a provider supports, optionally filtered by feature
   • find — show which providers support a capability and how to invoke it

2. Detect provider context (for capabilities without --provider):

   • Check CLAUDE_CODE_VERSION env → claude-code
   • Check CODEX_API_KEY env → codex
   • Check .cursor/ project directory → cursor
   • Fall back to aiwg runtime-info for authoritative detection

3. Run the appropriate command:

   # Current provider capabilities (auto-detected)
   aiwg steward capabilities
   
   # Named provider
   aiwg steward capabilities --provider copilot
   
   # Check specific feature on current provider
   aiwg steward capabilities --feature agent_teams
   
   # Full matrix — all providers, all features
   aiwg steward capabilities --all
   
   # Find providers that support a capability
   aiwg steward find --capability cron
   

4. Interpret and surface routing advice:

   • Native support: report the native tool or mechanism
   • Emulated support: show the aiwg command that emulates the feature
   • No support: report clearly and suggest the nearest alternative

Project-Local Authoring Routing

Steward capability routing is intentionally broader than the provider matrix when the user asks how to create AIWG artifacts for their own project. For project-local authoring intents, do not answer only with aiwg steward capabilities.

Route these intents directly:

Canonical docs: docs/customization/project-local-quickstart.md, docs/customization/project-local-lifecycle.md, and docs/customization/extensions-vs-addons-vs-frameworks-vs-plugins.md. Mention that project-local artifacts and provider definitions are trusted repo code and should be reviewed before deploy.

Feature-Domain Routing (proactive)

Three cross-cutting feature domains fall outside the framework quickrefs and were historically undiscoverable (#1623). The steward owns routing for them via the steward-quickref kernel skill. Be proactive — these are easy to miss:

Routing protocol:

1. Volunteer the affordance (Norman signifier). When a user is near one of these domains but hasn't found the entry point, surface it unprompted: "you can also author expansions, create or select a persona, or scaffold a project — want me to discover one?"
2. Discover, don't dead-end. Run the domain's aiwg discover phrase; the four discover facets fuse the result so the owning capability ranks top-3.
3. Re-query on low confidence. If the first pass is weak, broaden the phrase or try an adjacent domain before concluding "not found" — the skill-discovery rule forbids decline-without-search.
4. Show the selection. aiwg show <type> <name> for the chosen capability.

See steward-quickref for the full anchor tables.

Capability Matrix Source

The authoritative source is agentic/code/providers/capability-matrix.yaml. Key features tracked:

Examples

Example 1: Check current provider

User: "What does my provider support?"

Extraction: Capabilities request, no provider specified — auto-detect

Action:

aiwg steward capabilities

Response: "You are on claude-code. Native support: agent_teams, tasks, mcp, cron. Emulated via aiwg: behaviors (via hooks), mission_control (via aiwg mc)."

Example 2: Feature-specific check

User: "Does my provider support agent teams natively?"

Extraction: Feature check — agent_teams on current provider

Action:

aiwg steward capabilities --feature agent_teams

Response: "agent_teams on claude-code: Native (uses Claude Code's built-in Task tool). No emulation needed."

Example 3: Cross-provider lookup

User: "Which providers support cron natively?"

Extraction: find subcommand for cron capability

Action:

aiwg steward find --capability cron

Response:

cron support across providers:
  claude-code:  native
  codex:        emulated via aiwg-scheduler
  copilot:      emulated via aiwg-scheduler
  cursor:       emulated via aiwg-scheduler
  factory:      native
  opencode:     emulated via aiwg-scheduler
  warp:         emulated via aiwg-scheduler
  windsurf:     emulated via aiwg-scheduler
  openclaw:     emulated via aiwg-scheduler

Example 4: Full matrix

User: "Show me the capability matrix for all providers"

Extraction: capabilities --all

Action:

aiwg steward capabilities --all

Response: Formatted table of all 9 providers x all 6 features, with native/emulated/unsupported indicators.

Clarification Prompts

If the user's intent is ambiguous:

• "Are you asking about the provider you're currently using, or a specific provider?"
• "Should I check all features or a specific one?"

References

• @$AIWG_ROOT/src/cli/handlers/steward.ts — Steward command handler
• @$AIWG_ROOT/agentic/code/providers/capability-matrix.yaml — Authoritative capability matrix
• @$AIWG_ROOT/docs/cli-reference.md — CLI reference