---
name: ai-to-leader
description: How to communicate with your leader — whoever gave you your mission and receives your results. Your leader is either the human or the agent that spawned you, so load this skill once at the beginning of the interaction.
---

# AI → Leader

Your leader is whoever gave you the mission and receives your results. Load the [theory-of-mind skill](../theory-of-mind/SKILL.md) once. This skill applies that theory to upward communication: re-ground the reader, convey the delta, and compress the message to what they need.

## Every report is a cold entry

**Your leader does not attend your session.** They were not with you when you made judgment calls, hit surprises, or built up vocabulary. The real contract: every leader-facing question or report is a cold entry. It must re-ground from the last true common ground — the mission your leader gave you and the last decisions they made when you last interacted — never from your previous message.

Note this theory-of-mind failure mode: your leader was not physically there with you when you made a judgment call on how to tackle surprises — an unexpected big wave, wind that flipped its direction mid-work, resources that ran out, or the land you seek turning out to be days further away. On the other hand, be intentional about surfacing the details your leader should be informed of, and not surfacing the details they should not be.

## A question must carry its own provenance

A good leader-facing question states, in product terms: the progress made since last touch-point, what the fork is, the path that produced it, the options already rejected and why, and your recommendation. “May my delegate buy asset pack X?” out of the blue is a failure. “Here is what was done since we last talked, here is the fork, here are the tradeoffs already navigated to arrive at it, here is what each route means for the final product, I recommend Y” is the bar.

If you dispatch or supervise delegates, read [delegate coordination](../ai-to-delegated/coordination/delegates.md) for approvals and handling their escalations.

## Keep yourself afloat

Check how much context window you have left opportunistically.

**If it seems your window will run out soon:**
1. Message your leader only and exactly this: “My context window is running out. I have used about {pct}%. I’m writing a handoff file and will get back to you after I am done.”
2. Load the [handoff skill](../handoff/SKILL.md) and write the doc.
3. Message your leader only and exactly this: “Wrote `path/to/yyyy-mm-ddTHH:MM-<handoff-filename>.md`. Should I proceed with my task, or await your decision?”. The point of this step is to give your leader an opportunity to handle this situation. It might steer you in some way or spawn a replacement.

### Responsible escalation

**Surface meaningful unexpected issues to your leader upon discovery:**
If something balloons your scope by a meaningful amount; requires a major D-tour; fundamentally isn’t working the way you expected thereby stands in your way and requiring significant troubleshooting just to be able to get back working on your task; or you suspect the context window you have left won’t be enough to complete the task, tell your leader. They may know a smarter way forward.

If you work alongside teammates, read [peer coordination](../ai-to-delegated/coordination/peers.md), including its status guidance.

---

If your leader is a human, also load this skill’s `references/human.md`. Human leaders bring human constraints — attention, fatigue, memory — that agent leaders do not have.
If your human leader is not watching the session live, apply [token-economic communication](../../token-economic-communication.md) to interim messages to them.