Skills are the right prototyping medium
Natural-language skills let domain experts and engineers discover a useful procedure quickly. They preserve examples, policies, and tool instructions in a form people can edit. Rote leaves the source skill untouched; graduation produces a separate operational artifact.
What graduation produces
The output includes runtime-agnostic pipeline.yaml, extracted deterministic modules, typed LLM-judge signatures, and a runtime adapter. Mandatory checks in prose become required graph nodes. Human approvals become durable gates. The intermediate representation is Pydantic-validated before code emission.
A real quickstart
Run: uvx --from rote-cli rote graduate ./my-skill --runtime cloudflare --out ./graduated. Other targets include DBOS, Temporal, Python, DBOS TypeScript, and Inngest. Rote is pre-1.0; direct API backends emit explicit integration boundaries that your team implements and tests.
Where MCP fits
MCP supplies capabilities and skills describe procedures. Rote can preserve authenticated MCP-backed external nodes in a graduated workflow, then expose the deployed workflow as one typed MCP tool. An agent can trigger the reliable result without replaying every intermediate tool call.
Frequently asked questions
How do I turn a SKILL.md into production automation?
Run rote graduate against the skill directory and choose a runtime. Review the generated pipeline, implement or connect any external integration boundaries, run the eval scorecard and tests, then deploy the emitted runtime project.
Does Rote replace MCP?
No. A graduated workflow can call authenticated MCP servers, or use direct API integrations. Rote can also expose the deployed workflow as one typed MCP tool, so an agent triggers a durable workflow instead of replaying the original multi-step skill.
What is agentic compilation?
Agentic compilation separates intelligence used to discover or judge a process from execution that can be expressed as code. Rote applies that idea to skills: it converts a proven natural-language procedure into typed workflow artifacts while retaining bounded model nodes.
Graduate a workflow
Inspect the open-source CLI or run a graduation in Rote Cloud.