Orca Orchestration

This file is a discovery stub, not the usage guide. The full, version-matched Orca orchestration reference is served by the orca binary itself — kept out of this file on purpose so it can never drift from the binary that will actually run your commands.

Use Orca orchestration to run work in separate Orca worker agents and get their results back: when the user asks for Orca workers or supervision (monitor, task DAGs, ask/reply, decision gates), or when the work needs something your own subagents cannot give, such as a different agent or its own Orca workspace. "Have Codex (or Claude) review this and report back" means an Orca worker of that agent, even when you have your own model subagents. Use it as well when you are a dispatched worker sending ask questions or worker_done. Otherwise prefer your own subagents, including for long or parallel work. Use the orca-cli skill instead to hand work off with nothing expected back ("hand off", "handoff", "handover", "give this to another agent", "another worktree"), and for ordinary terminal control, shell commands, worktree management, and the built-in browser. Coordination requires real Orca runtime state; never substitute a non-Orca subagent tool when the user asked for Orca orchestration.

Resolve the CLI for this session

Choose the executable once and reuse it for every later command:

• If the ORCA_CLI_COMMAND environment variable is set, use its value. Orca exports this for managed WSL sessions.
• Otherwise, in a dev checkout whose session exposes ORCA_DEV_REPO_ROOT, use orca-dev.
• Otherwise, on Linux outside an Orca-managed terminal, use orca-ide. Never run bare orca there — outside Orca's terminals it normally resolves to the GNOME Orca screen reader (/usr/bin/orca) and starts speech on the user's machine.
• Otherwise, use orca.

Below, ORCA is a placeholder for the executable you resolved. Substitute it before running anything; do not create a shell variable or run ORCA literally. This works the same way in POSIX shells, PowerShell, and cmd.exe.

If the selected executable cannot run, report its exact error and stop. Do not fall through to another executable, which could silently target a different Orca build.

Load the version-matched guide before running Orca commands

ORCA skills get orchestration

That prints the compact, version-matched guide for the exact binary that will handle your next commands. It covers the normal local coordinator loop and dispatched-worker obligations. For a conditional action gate such as remote placement, uncertain release recovery, or expanded DAG work, load only the reference that gate names with ORCA skills get orchestration --reference references/<file>.md (--references lists the names). If that binary rejects --reference, run ORCA skills get orchestration --full and read the named bundled reference before acting.

Use the selected executable's --help for commands or flags the guide does not cover. If a command reports that Orca is not running, start it with ORCA open --json and retry. If it fails with runtime_access_denied, your sandbox blocked the connection: re-run it with escalated permissions, and do not run ORCA open or restart Orca. If skills get is unknown, explain that updating Orca restores the guide; use --help for read-only discovery and do not guess unsupported commands.