ralph and pipeline are non-functional in Claude Code: Task tool doesn't exist + context: fork blocks Agent

[graffhyrum]

Summary

The generated ralph and pipeline skills are broken in Claude Code. Two compounding issues in the generated skill configuration prevent subagent spawning from working at all.

Environment

• Claude Code v2.1.76
• Plugin: arscontexta v1.6 (generated skills)

Issue 1: Task tool does not exist in Claude Code

The generated ralph/SKILL.md and pipeline/SKILL.md reference a Task tool that does not exist in Claude Code:

allowed-tools: Read, Write, Edit, Grep, Glob, Bash, Task

Task(
  prompt = {the constructed prompt},
  description = "..."
)

The subagent spawner in Claude Code is the Agent tool, not Task. When ralph attempts to spawn a worker it cannot find the tool and halts. The subagent_type: knowledge-worker referenced in the skill body is also non-standard — Claude Code's types are general-purpose, Explore, etc.

Observed behavior: ralph self-halts with "The Task tool is not available in this session" (pre-fix) or "The Agent tool is not available in this session" (after renaming Task → Agent, before fix 2).

Issue 2: context: fork on orchestrator skills blocks Agent access

Both ralph and pipeline have context: fork in their frontmatter. Per Claude Code's own skills reference, context: fork means "Run in isolated subagent." An already-isolated subagent cannot spawn further subagents — the Agent tool is unavailable from within a fork.

This means fix 1 alone (renaming Task → Agent) is insufficient. Even with the correct tool name, ralph cannot call Agent from inside a forked context.

The context: fork setting is appropriate for leaf worker skills (connect, distill, validate, refresh, etc.) that do self-contained work. It is not appropriate for orchestrator skills that need to spawn workers.

Fix

ralph/SKILL.md and pipeline/SKILL.md:

1. Remove context: fork from frontmatter
2. Replace Task → Agent in allowed-tools
3. Replace Task(prompt = ..., description = ...) call sites with Agent(prompt = ..., description = ..., subagent_type = "general-purpose")

All other skills (connect, distill, validate, refresh, seed, stats, graph, next, learn, remember, rethink, refactor, tasks, validate-schema) — context: fork is correct for these and should not be changed.

Impact

This affects the core value proposition of the plugin. /ralph N and /pipeline [file] are the primary automation commands and both fail silently or with a confusing blocker message for every user on Claude Code. There is no workaround without manually patching the generated skill files.