# Role skills in .agents/skills/, core/agents/ reserved for subagent definitions

Role skills (Architect, Developer, Reviewer, Security, QA, Ops) live in `.agents/skills/` with `category: roles`. They are ordinary skills that activate a cognitive mode in the current conversation — loaded on trigger, follow the standard SKILL.md authoring format, and use the same deployment pipeline as every other skill. Placing them in a separate `core/agents/` directory would require a distinct deployment path, a distinct provider adapter, and a distinct discovery mechanism for no functional gain.

`core/agents/` is reserved for a distinct content type: provider-agnostic subagent definitions that run in isolated execution contexts (`context: fork` in Claude Code terms). These are skills or agents that need a fresh context window, a dedicated system prompt, and no access to the parent conversation history. The Claude Code adapter translates `core/agents/` definitions to `.claude/agents/`. This is structurally different from a role skill that loads inline — the isolation boundary is the defining characteristic, not the cognitive mode.

The factory research conflates these two into a single `roles/` skill category. The distinction matters here because Claude Code's subagent execution model is meaningfully different from skill activation, and the provider adapter pattern requires them to be in separate source locations to translate correctly.