feat: add distributed-coordination skills from Part 4 blog (auth isolation, stale locks, message serialization, notification routing)

[tamirdresher]

Summary

Four skills earned from running 8 Ralph instances in production, documented in blog post ''When Eight Ralphs Fight Over One Login''.

Each skill maps 1:1 to a textbook distributed systems pattern.

Skills Added

\gh-auth-isolation\

Problem: Multiple Ralphs on the same machine fight over ~/.config/gh/hosts.yml. One Ralph calls \gh auth switch\ and clobbers every other Ralph's auth. 37 consecutive failures in 3 hours.
Fix: Per-process \GH_CONFIG_DIR\ — each process gets its own isolated gh config.
DS pattern: State partitioning

\stale-lock-detection\

Problem: A crash leaves a lock file with a dead PID. The next Ralph start refuses to run, guarding against a process that no longer exists.
Fix: Three-layer guard: named OS mutex (auto-released on crash) + PID validation + lockfile with registered cleanup.
DS pattern: Lease-based locking with failure detection (same as ZooKeeper ephemeral nodes)

\message-serialization\

Problem: A 7KB multiline prompt passed via \Start-Process --ArgumentList\ gets interpreted by Windows as the command name. Result: ''command not found: Ralph, Go! MAXIMIZE PARALLELISM...''
Fix: Write prompt to temp file, pass file path as argument.
DS pattern: Message indirection (same as gRPC + protobuf)

\

otification-routing
Problem: 20+ notifications/day flooding one Teams channel. Failure alerts buried in tech news. Everyone stops reading.
Fix: \ eams-channels.json\ routing config + channel-tag convention. Each notification type goes to the right channel.
DS pattern: Pub-sub topic routing (same as Kafka topics / RabbitMQ routing keys)

What's Included

• .squad/skills/gh-auth-isolation/SKILL.md\
• .squad/skills/stale-lock-detection/SKILL.md\
• .squad/skills/message-serialization/SKILL.md\
• .squad/skills/notification-routing/SKILL.md\
• \docs/src/content/docs/features/distributed-coordination.md\ — feature guide
• \docs/src/content/blog/029-distributed-coordination-skills.md\ — blog post
• \ est/skills.test.ts\ — 24 new tests (structure + content validation for each skill)
• \ est/docs-build.test.ts\ — \distributed-coordination\ added to \EXPECTED_FEATURES\

Tests

\
✓ test/skills.test.ts (51 tests) — all pass
\\

Relates to #858 (tamirdresher/tamresearch1)

[tamirdresher]

Hey @bradygaster — this PR contains four skills from my Part 4 blog post (''When Eight Ralphs Fight Over One Login'').

All four are earned-in-production patterns from running 8 concurrent Ralphs on the same machine. Each maps to a classic distributed systems pattern that others will hit when scaling Squad beyond a single agent loop:

Skill	Problem Solved	Pattern
\gh-auth-isolation\	Multi-Ralph auth race (37 consecutive failures)	State partitioning
\stale-lock-detection\	Stale PID lockfile blocking restart after crash	Lease-based locking
\message-serialization\	7KB prompt treated as command name by Windows shell	Message indirection
\
otification-routing\	Notification firehose — all alerts to one channel	Pub-sub topic routing

All 51 tests pass. Feature doc + blog post included.

[bradygaster]

Closing — distributed coordination is shelved (see #332). Will reopen when unblocked.