Your First 10 Minutes

This guide walks you through your first OrchestKit session. By the end, you'll understand how skills, agents, and hooks work together.

Step 1: Health Check

After installing, verify everything is working:

/ork:doctor

This runs diagnostics on all 67 skills, 37 agents, and 87 hooks. If anything is misconfigured, it tells you exactly what to fix.

Step 2: Your First Command Skill

Make a small change to any file in your project, then:

/ork:commit

What happens behind the scenes:

1. The commit skill loads — it knows conventional commit format
2. Hooks fire: git-validator checks your branch, dangerous-command-blocker ensures safety
3. Claude analyzes your staged diff and writes a conventional commit message
4. The commit includes Co-Authored-By: Claude attribution

What you see:

Analyzing staged changes...

Commit message:
  feat: add user email validation to registration form

  Validate email format and check for duplicate emails before
  creating user accounts. Returns 422 with specific error messages.

  Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>

Proceed? [Y/n]

Step 3: See Agents Activate

Agents activate from keywords in your natural language. Try:

"Review the code I just committed for security issues"

What happens:

• OrchestKit detects "review" and "security" keywords
• The security-auditor agent spawns automatically
• It loads skills: owasp-top-10, defense-in-depth, llm-safety-patterns
• Hooks fire: security-command-audit tracks the review

You didn't name the agent. You just described what you wanted, and OrchestKit matched the right specialist.

Step 4: Try Multi-Agent Orchestration

For a more powerful example:

/ork:implement "Add rate limiting middleware to the API"

This spawns multiple agents in parallel:

/ork:implement
  │
  ├──▶ backend-system-architect   Plans the implementation
  │     Skills: api-design-framework, rate-limiting, middleware
  │
  ├──▶ test-generator             Writes tests alongside code
  │     Skills: pytest-advanced, integration-testing
  │
  └──▶ security-auditor           Validates the approach
        Skills: owasp-top-10, input-validation

Step 5: Explore the Memory System

OrchestKit remembers across sessions. Try:

/ork:remember "We use JWT tokens for auth, not session cookies"

This stores your decision in the knowledge graph. In future sessions, when you or an agent works on authentication, this context is automatically injected.

Check what's remembered:

/ork:memory search "authentication"

What Just Happened?

In 10 minutes, you used:

• 3 command skills: /ork:commit, /ork:implement, /ork:remember
• 4 agents: security-auditor, backend-system-architect, test-generator, plus the commit workflow
• ~15 hooks: firing invisibly on every action (security gates, memory sync, audit logging)
• ~10 reference skills: auto-injected into agents (you never invoked them directly)

Next Steps