orchestra-skills

Agent skills and reference docs for diagnosing, fixing, and triaging Orchestra data pipelines with an AI assistant. The workflows assume Orchestra's cloud MCP server is connected so the agent can list runs, fetch logs and artifacts, and retry pipelines from your workspace.

This repo is a plugin marketplace: the single orchestra plugin bundles every skill and installs into both Claude Code and Cursor from the manifests at the repo root (see Install).

What is in this repo

Skills

Each skill auto-triggers when your prompt matches it — just describe the problem in natural language. The "Try saying" column shows a prompt that activates each one. Skills are grouped below by what they're for.

Diagnose & fix pipelines

Author & maintain pipelines

Account health & governance

dbt state-aware orchestration

Data-quality testing

To get going: connect Orchestra's cloud MCP server (see Install below), install the orchestra plugin so the skills are discoverable by your client (see Install), then just ask.

Reference library

Start at skills/orchestra/references/orchestra/README.md. Highlights:

• Pipeline — authoring schema + examples, failure classification, remediation playbooks, and an optional local fix-history template (knowledge-store.md)
• State-aware orchestration (dbt SAO) — source-freshness and build_after schemas, enabling use_state_orchestration, and a per-warehouse freshness matrix for Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, MotherDuck/DuckDB, Redshift, Microsoft Fabric, and Postgres (plus an other fallback) (dbt-sao/)
• MCP — cloud MCP setup and tool quick reference

Install for humans

Prerequisites

• An Orchestra API key (Orchestra UI → Settings → API Keys)

1. Connect Orchestra's cloud MCP server. Point your client at the hosted endpoint following the cloud MCP docs (~/.claude/mcp.json for Claude Code, or Cursor MCP settings) and authenticate with your ORCHESTRA_API_KEY — no local install required. Restart/reload so tools such as list_pipeline_runs and list_task_run_logs appear.
2. Install the orchestra plugin so the skills are discoverable by your client:
   • Claude Code — add this repo as a marketplace, then install the plugin:

     /plugin marketplace add orchestra-hq/orchestra-skills
     /plugin install orchestra@orchestra-marketplace
     

     (or point at a local clone: /plugin marketplace add /path/to/orchestra-skills).
   • Cursor — add the marketplace and install the orchestra plugin from .cursor-plugin/marketplace.json per Cursor's plugin docs. Each skill auto-triggers from a matching prompt once installed.
3. For agent behavior in this repo, read AGENTS.md.

Typical workflows

Failed run — Paste a pipeline run URL, run UUID, pipeline name, or error snippet. identify-pipeline-error parses the input, loads the pipeline run and failed task runs, identifies the failing task and its cause, then routes to the right fixer: a dbt code issue → fix-pipeline-dbt-task, a Python code/schema issue → fix-pipeline-python-task, an Orchestra-platform/config issue → fix-orchestra-pipeline. Data, vendor/ingestion, auth, network, and other causes are reported with the right next action by identify-pipeline-error itself.

Author pipeline YAML — Describe the desired stages/tasks and create a version: v1 pipeline YAML. The authoring skill validates (via orchestra-cli or MCP) and remediates validation errors until clean.

Review before merge — Use the triage skill when you want a branch fix, validation run, and triage summary, then explicit approval before merge and production retry.

Downstream symptom — Triage can start from a downstream issue (stale dashboard, bad dbt output) and walk upstream through the pipeline graph.

Contributing

• Skills live under skills/orchestra/skills/ and shared Orchestra material under skills/orchestra/references/orchestra/, all inside the single orchestra plugin bundle. There is a single skill tree — no generated copies to keep in sync.
• To add a skill, create skills/orchestra/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md with name + description frontmatter, put any supporting references//templates/ in the same folder, and add it to the relevant category table under Skills. The orchestra plugin exposes it automatically — bump the version in skills/orchestra/.claude-plugin/plugin.json and .cursor-plugin/plugin.json. Also add its path to the skills array in .tessl-plugin/plugin.json and bump its version — this isn't auto-generated, so a skill left out here silently stops showing up in Tessl's published listing. CI (Validate Skills) checks the frontmatter, that SKILL.md stays under ~500 lines, and that the manifests are valid JSON. Write skills to be client-agnostic — describe capabilities (e.g. "if your client can schedule a wake-up…") rather than naming a specific tool.
• Recording fixes is optional and deferred to your client's persistent memory — never commit workspace-specific fix history. Extend pipeline/diagnosis-patterns.md only with generic, reusable patterns.
• Evals. Skill evals live under evals/ — an eval-driven harness that runs a skill with and without it via the headless claude CLI and grades the output. Currently wired up for write-snowflake-dq-tests. See evals/README.md for setup and how to run, grade, and add a suite.
• Do not commit API keys, .env files, or other secrets.

Agents editing this repo should follow AGENTS.md.