Agent skill · nousresearch
agent-merge-conflict-arbiter
Neutral arbiter for merge conflicts between two agents.
What it needs
About 5k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
Agent Merge-Conflict Arbiter Resolve a git merge conflict between two AGENTS' branches as an impartial third party. Agents resolving conflicts against a peer's work reliably either overwrite the peer or abandon their own change — they lack the peer's context and are biased toward their own side. This skill is the fix: a neutral reconciler that receives both diffs plus both sides' stated intents and produces a merged result, like a merge-queue arbiter. When to Use Two agent branches/worktrees collide during a parallel campaign (kanban engineering pipeline, parallel-PR wave, multi-worktree refactor). git merge or git rebase halts on conflicts between two agents' work and neither original agent should self-adjudicate. Do NOT use for conflicts within a single agent's own work, or for trivial lockfile/generated-file conflicts (regenerate those instead). Prerequisites A repo checkout containing the halted merge, or the two branch names plus permission to run the merge yourself. Both sides' intent sources: kanban completion summaries (terminal running hermes kanban show <task-id>), PR bodies, or at minimum each branch's commit messages. The project's build/test command, if one exists. How to Run Standalone — a human (or agent) invokes this skill inside the conflicted repo: load the skill, then follow the Procedure top to bottom. Spawned neutral agent — the preferred shape in multi-agent campaigns: delegatetask: spawn a subagent whose task message contains the repo path, both branch names, and both sides' intent summaries verbatim, plus an instruction to follow this skill. Kanban-native: create a reconciliation card assigned to a third profile (not either worker's profile) with BOTH conflicted cards linked as parents — kanbancreate(title="reconcile branch-a x branch-b", assignee="reconciler", parents=["ta", "tb"]). …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills nousresearch/agent-merge-conflict-arbiter