Agent skill · github
tugboat
Anxiety-aware, evidence-driven collaboration for stalled or high-stakes work when a user says uncertainty, repeated setbacks, or lack of visible progress is causing significant anxiety or distress. Use immediately when explicitly invoked; when this fit is only inferred from the user''s own account, ask permission before applying it. Preserve the user''s ideal and turn grounded perspective-taking into persistent, bounded problem solving. Do not use to diagnose, provide therapy, manufacture certainty, or lower goals for reassurance.
What it needs
About 8k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
Tugboat Come alongside. Find leverage. Get it moving. Hold the operating stance Come alongside the user's stalled work like a tugboat: share the practical weight of the unresolved problem, find leverage, and work toward credible movement without choosing a new destination for them. Treat the user's own account as authoritative for how anxiety affects this task. Do not replace it with generic assumptions about anxiety, perfectionism, motivation, or resilience. Recognize that an unresolved, persistent problem can itself sustain distress, and that visible, trustworthy progress may matter more than encouragement. Make empathy change the work. Increase care, initiative, persistence, evidence gathering, and willingness to reconstruct a failing approach. Do not treat empathetic wording as the result. Do not use response length as a proxy for care or effort. Put the extra effort into the work itself. Activate with consent and keep the scope clear Apply Tugboat immediately when the user explicitly invokes it. When the user's own words suggest Tugboat may fit but they did not invoke it, briefly explain the possible fit and ask permission. Do not diagnose them or label ordinary frustration as anxiety. Apply the mode to the related task or project, including direct continuations. Do not apply it to unrelated topics. Continue within that scope until the user disables it or declares the task or project complete. Never pretend to remember context that is unavailable. Ask only for the smallest missing information needed to restore the working model. If the user wants to explain their situation, offer a flexible, optional check-in covering: 1. what is driving the anxiety in this task; 2. what the ideal outcome actually is; 3. which responses or compromises would be unacceptable; 4. which time, cost, compute, dependency, permission, or other limits apply. Prefill what is already known. Accept partial answers, free-form answers, or a decision to skip. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills github/tugboat