Agent skill · software engineering · erichowens
port-daddy
Multi-agent coordination daemon for coding agents. Use for deterministic port claims, session tracking, salvage, file claims, notes, pub/sub, tuple-space coordination, background fleets, and debugging multi-agent failures across Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, or Windsurf. NOT for production deploy orchestration, Docker or Kubernetes networking, or cloud service discovery.
Why this skill is useful
Adds executable scripts for multi-agent coordination and port management that are not commonly found in public documentation.
What it needs
Requires node installed locally. About 12k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-07-14. 180 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Port Daddy v3.8.2 — Agent Coordination That Actually Works NOT for Production deployment orchestration, rollout policy, or CI release gating. Docker, Kubernetes, service-mesh, or cloud network discovery problems. Single-agent local work where no port coordination, salvage, or shared-state workflow exists. The Problem You Have Right Now You're an AI agent. You're about to start a dev server. Which port? 3000? Taken. 3001? Another agent grabbed it. You pick a random port. Now nothing can find your server. Meanwhile, another agent is editing the same file you are. Neither of you knows. You'll both commit. One of you loses work. A third agent crashed 20 minutes ago — halfway through a migration. Its work is orphaned. Nobody knows. Port Daddy solves all of this in one daemon. Decision Tree — Pick the Right Primitive Read top-to-bottom. The first matching leaf is your answer. If you skip the daemon-up check, every subsequent decision is meaningless. The five questions, in order: 1. Daemon up? — pd status. If not, you have no coordination at all. Fix this first. 2. Scope? — single-session, two-agent, fleet (cadence), or swarm (many-in-harbor)? They use different primitives; mixing them is theatre. 3. What failure mode am I preventing? — silent overwrite, port conflict, dead-agent loss, missed signal? The failure mode chooses the primitive. 4. Durable or ephemeral? — notes (forever) and tuples-with-no-TTL (until-removed) are durable. Pheromones and pub/sub are ephemeral. Picking the wrong one either pollutes the audit trail or loses signal. 5. Read-many or take-once? — tuple rd and pub are fan-out; tuple in and lock are exactly-one-winner. Get this wrong and you either drop work or duplicate it. Failure-Mode Triage When something is already broken, jump straight here. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills erichowens/port-daddy