Guide · Agent skill
How to use the Saga Orchestration agent skill
Updated · written with AI from the project's own documentation and checked against our catalogue data
The saga-orchestration skill is a set of guidance and reference material that an AI agent can use when you ask it to design or debug a saga, which is a way of coordinating a business process across several services without one big all-or-nothing transaction. It is aimed at backend engineers building order, booking or approval workflows. After reading this guide you will know what the skill changes about the agent's behaviour, how to install it, how to phrase requests so it triggers, and what to check before you rely on its output.
Saga Orchestrationwshobson/agents · MIT Download the skill Quick start
- 1Download the ZIP. Download the saga-orchestration ZIP from this page.
- 2Unzip into a skills folder. Extract it into ~/.claude/skills/ for personal use, or into .claude/skills/ in a project for use in that codebase only.
- 3Or upload in the Claude apps. If you use the Claude apps, go to Settings → Capabilities → Skills and upload the ZIP there.
- 4Describe your situation. Ask in plain terms about a distributed transaction, compensating actions, a booking rollback or a stuck saga, and include your services, steps and messaging system.
- 5Review the output. Check the saga definition, compensation logic and timeouts against your own requirements, then test each compensation path before shipping.
What the saga-orchestration skill makes the agent do
When the skill is installed, the agent gets guidance for coordinating business processes that span several services. Take an order that touches inventory, payment and shipping. Instead of one transaction that either fully succeeds or fully rolls back, the agent designs an ordered sequence of steps. Each step has a compensating action that undoes it if a later step fails.
The skill's stated outputs include a saga definition with ordered steps, action commands and compensation commands, an orchestrator or choreography implementation, compensation logic for each participant service, per-step timeout configuration, and monitoring setup such as state machine metrics and stuck saga detection.
- Saga definition: ordered steps with action and compensation commands
- Orchestrator or choreography code for the pattern you choose
- Idempotent, always-succeeds compensation logic for each participant
- Step timeout settings with per-step deadlines
- Monitoring suggestions and troubleshooting for stuck or mis-ordered compensation
Install the skill from the ZIP or the Claude apps
Download the saga-orchestration ZIP from this page. You then have two options. You can unzip it into your personal skills folder at ~/.claude/skills/, or into a project's .claude/skills/ folder if you want the skill available only for that codebase. Alternatively, upload the ZIP in the Claude apps under Settings → Capabilities → Skills.
After installing, the skill folder should contain SKILL.md and a references/ directory with advanced-patterns.md and details.md. SKILL.md is the entry point that the agent reads first, and the reference files hold longer code and templates that it can draw on when needed.
- Personal install: ~/.claude/skills/
- Project install: .claude/skills/ inside your repository
- Claude apps: Settings → Capabilities → Skills, then upload the ZIP
Trigger the skill with natural requests
You do not need a special command. The skill's description lists the situations it is meant for, so ask in plain terms that match them. The source describes four scenarios: implementing distributed transactions across microservices where two-phase commit is unavailable, designing compensating actions for a failed order workflow that spans inventory, payment and shipping, building an event-driven saga coordinator for a travel booking that must roll back hotel, flight and car rental reservations, and debugging sagas stuck in a state where compensation steps never complete.
Include the details the skill asks for. Name your services and which one owns each step, say which steps must be atomic and which can be eventual, describe the failure modes and retry policy, give the latency expectations per step, and name your messaging system such as Kafka, RabbitMQ or SQS.
- Design a saga for order placement that reserves inventory, charges payment and creates a shipment, with a compensating action for each step.
- Our booking service must roll back hotel, flight and car rental reservations if one fails. Propose a saga with per-step timeouts.
- Our payment step sometimes gets stuck in COMPENSATING. Help me find why compensation never reaches FAILED.
- Write a choreography-based saga for approvals using RabbitMQ, and tell me what to test at each step index.
Check the troubleshooting advice for stuck sagas
The skill's troubleshooting section covers the most common production problems. A saga stuck in COMPENSATING usually means a compensation handler throws an unhandled exception and never publishes SagaCompensationCompleted. The skill's fix is to add dead-letter queue handling to compensation consumers and to publish a result event on every compensation, even when the work was already rolled back. The example below shows that pattern.
Other entries cover duplicate executions after an orchestrator restart (guard each step with an idempotency key), lost events in choreography (use a durable broker and a saga_log table), step timeouts that fire too early for slow but valid steps, and compensation running in the wrong order. For the wrong-order case, the skill advises checking that compensation runs from current_step - 1 down to 0 and adding a test that fails at each step index.
- Stuck in COMPENSATING: check for unhandled exceptions and missing completion events
- Duplicate steps after restart: use idempotency keys
- Lost choreography events: durable broker plus saga_log table
- Timeouts too short: configure timeouts per step type, not one global value
- Wrong rollback order: test failures at every step index
async def handle_release_reservation(self, command: Dict):
try:
await self.release_reservation(command["original_result"]["reservation_id"])
except ReservationNotFoundError:
pass # Already released — treat as success
# Always publish completion, regardless of outcome
await self.event_publisher.publish("SagaCompensationCompleted", {
"saga_id": command["saga_id"],
"step_name": "reserve_inventory"
})Know the safety notes, requirements and limits
The listing states that the skill requires nothing beyond itself, runs no scripts and makes no network calls. It is text guidance and code that the agent writes for you to review, so it does not operate your systems. The skill is licensed under MIT.
The output is design and code guidance. It still needs engineering review, testing and integration into your own services. The skill is not suited to a simple application with a single database, where ordinary local transactions are enough and a saga adds complexity you do not need.
- Requirements: none listed beyond the skill files
- Runs scripts: no
- Uses network: no
- Licence: MIT
- Generated code must be reviewed and tested before production use
Tips for getting useful output
Give the agent your real service boundaries and failure modes, because the skill's guidance depends on them. The skill's own best practices are a good checklist to request against: make every step idempotent, use a saga_id in every event and log, implement per-step timeouts rather than a global one, log every state transition, and test compensation paths explicitly by injecting failures at each step index.
Ask for monitoring as well as code. The skill can propose state machine metrics, stuck saga detection and dead-letter queue recovery, and the references include Prometheus instrumentation and stuck saga PromQL alerts.
- Describe each service, the steps it owns and which steps must be atomic
- Ask for the saga_id to flow through every event and log line
- Request a test that injects a failure at every step index
- Ask for DLQ recovery and stuck saga alerts alongside the core code
What people use it for
- Designing a compensating action chain for an order that reserves inventory, takes payment and creates a shipment
- Planning a travel booking coordinator that must roll back hotel, flight and car rental reservations
- Replacing a fragile two-phase commit between microservices with asynchronous compensation
- Diagnosing a production saga stuck in COMPENSATING by reviewing handler error paths
- Setting per-step timeouts for steps with very different latency, such as payment versus shipment creation
Frequently asked questions
How do I install the saga-orchestration agent skill?
Download the ZIP from this page and unzip it into ~/.claude/skills/ for personal use, or into .claude/skills/ inside a project. In the Claude apps you can instead upload the ZIP under Settings → Capabilities → Skills.
Does the saga-orchestration skill have any requirements?
The listing states no requirements. The skill runs no scripts and uses no network access, so it is guidance and code the agent writes for you to review.
Is the saga-orchestration skill free?
The skill is listed under the MIT licence. Check the licence file in the repository for the exact terms before you reuse its code in your own product.
Why is my saga stuck in COMPENSATING?
According to the skill's troubleshooting section, this usually happens when a compensation handler throws an unhandled exception and never publishes SagaCompensationCompleted. Add dead-letter queue handling to compensation consumers and publish a completion event even when the rollback was already done.
When should I not use a saga?
Skip sagas for a simple application with a single database, where ordinary local transactions are enough. The skill itself is aimed at teams that need coordination across several services.
How is saga orchestration different from choreography?
In orchestration a central coordinator tells each service what to do next, while in choreography services react to each other's events. The skill can produce either style, so describe your preference and your messaging setup when you ask.
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Our verdict
Choose this skill if you are a backend engineer designing order, booking or approval workflows across microservices, or debugging sagas stuck in production. Pick something else if you need a finished tool or work on a single-database app, since the output is design and code guidance that still needs engineering review and testing.
Download the skill