Ars Operandi

Ars Operandi is a public Codex skill pack for operational adapters: deployment platforms, hosting providers, DNS, edge services, VPS runtimes, Codex app thread management, and other external operating surfaces.

It complements Ora et Labora. Ora et Labora defines the repo-first workflow: issues, branches, worktrees, PRs, verification, releases, and rollback discipline. Ars Operandi defines provider-specific operating procedures that an agent should use inside that workflow.

Skills

Skill	Use for
codex-thread-manager	User-facing Codex app thread creation, naming, verification, and project/workstream coordination
mailctl-email-access	Fail-closed, bounded GWS or Proton search, selected content, and attachment access through the canonical Ars mail MCP and CLI
dual-linear-mcp	Fail-closed, manifest-driven Linear routing across independently authenticated workspaces
openrouter-ops	OpenRouter workspace/key operations, ephemeral runtime key injection, and safe revoke/rotate workflows
railway-deploy	Railway deployment, release, variables, services, Postgres links, domains, smoke checks, and rollback notes

Future adapters may cover Cloudflare, Hetzner, Docker Compose VPS, Tailscale, Resend, and other operational surfaces.

Ars Operandi owns the canonical provider-aware mail runtime, tests, public skill, and dry-run-first installer. Normal Codex reads use one Mac-local ars-mail MCP process; Proton credentials are resolved once per process and retained only in RAM. Workflow Agent may remain only as an inactive transitional source until the consumer performs the documented atomic cutover; none of its other subsystems belong to this surface.

Usage

Copy a skill folder into the user skill directory, or use a skill-specific installer when one is provided.

cp -R skills/railway-deploy ~/.codex/skills/
cp -R skills/codex-thread-manager ~/.codex/skills/
cp -R skills/openrouter-ops ~/.codex/skills/

dual-linear-mcp includes a dry-run-first installer that also manages the fixed dual-linear MCP alias. See its installation reference; do not manually copy it and separately register a competing config.

mailctl-email-access includes the canonical runtime in this repository and a dry-run-first installer for the skill plus the fixed ars-mail MCP alias. See its runtime and installation reference. Do not register a competing mail MCP or copy the runtime into another repository.

Invoke explicitly when needed:

Use $railway-deploy to deploy this app on Railway.
Use $mailctl-email-access for bounded provider-aware mail from one explicit consumer route.

Credential Policy

This repository does not contain credentials.

Provider auth should live in the provider CLI's normal per-host login state, a CI secret store, or the provider's own variable/secrets system. Skills may describe where credentials belong, but must not include tokens, .env values, cookies, database URLs, or copied secret material.

Relationship To Ora et Labora

Use Ora et Labora skills for the workflow phase:

• issue-shaping for scope and acceptance criteria
• worktree-flow for branches, worktrees, and PRs
• verify-and-evidence for verification and evidence
• release-train for grouped dev to main promotion

Use Ars Operandi skills when a workflow phase touches a provider-specific runtime.

Development

Validate skill frontmatter and required files:

python scripts/validate_skills.py

Workflow examples live under .github/workflow-examples/. They are intentionally inert until copied into .github/workflows/ by a maintainer with a GitHub token that has workflow permissions.