Quickstart: adopt Steward in ~15 minutes

Get an agent co-maintaining your repo, in supervised mode. No autonomy yet — this is the on-ramp: read the model, wire the config, run one loop by hand, then climb.

Before you start

A coding agent that can load skills — anything that reads a SKILL.md-style procedure or a project rules file. Examples below use Claude Code, but nothing here depends on it.
A GitHub repository you maintain, with the gh CLI authenticated (gh auth status).
Steward checked out locally (git clone https://github.com/nesquena/steward-os) — you’ll copy its skills in step 2.
~15 minutes and an open issue or PR you can practice on.

You do not need any autonomy, scheduled jobs, or a chat integration to start. Those come later, on the adoption ladder.

The skills are runtime-agnostic SKILL.md procedures. Wherever a step names a Claude Code path or command, it’s a worked example — the equivalent in your own agent works the same way. See adapting a skill to your runtime.

1. Read the model (5 min)

Skim the architecture overview — the four roles, the autonomy bands, and the one idea everything rests on: reading is cheap; writing to a public surface in the project’s voice is the irreversible act that stays human-gated. You don’t need the whole site yet.

2. Get the skills into your repo

Put Steward’s loadable procedures where your agent discovers skills. In Claude Code that’s .claude/skills/:

# from your project root, with steward-os checked out alongside it
mkdir -p .claude/skills
cp -R /path/to/steward-os/skills/* .claude/skills/

Your agent picks these up on next launch. (Using a different runtime? Drop them wherever it loads skills, or point its rules file at them — the SKILL.md bodies are the same.) They’re the procedures the setup interview and the lifecycle playbooks tell the agent to load.

3. Wire it to your project

Have your agent load the project-system-setup skill and tell it:

run the setup interview

The agent works through the setup interview — your repos, scope anchors, CI, review tools, autonomy posture — and writes a config.yaml for your project. It asks only what it needs, accepts “skip” for anything optional, and never guesses.

To see a finished one, read Steward’s own setup/config.yaml, which configures this repo.

4. Prove it with one supervised loop (Level 1)

Pick an open issue or PR. Ask the agent to run the matching playbook in a supervised session — you watch, it proposes, you approve every public write:

An issue → load issue-triage, ask it to triage that issue and draft (not post) a reply.
A PR → load pr-triage, ask it to run the fit screen and summarize.

Nothing is posted without your say-so. That’s Level 1: the playbooks run in supervised sessions, so you get value on day one without handing over any autonomy.

5. Climb

You’ve done the read→run step. From here you add capability deliberately, one rung at a time:

Level 2: a read-only triage scoreboard and digests.
Level 3: promote mechanical, reversible, watched actions to autonomy behind the watchdog pattern.
Level 4: the full pipeline.

See the adoption levels for the whole ladder, and Steward on Steward to see it applied to this repo.