ForgePlan

Orchestra MCP — Development skill for Claude Code

Development community

Claude Code skill — a measured field guide to the Orchestra MCP tools: how they fail silently, which server and identity you hold, how to verify before you write.

How to install Orchestra MCP

This entry records only its repository, not the path inside it, so there is no exact command to give. Open ForgePlan/orchestra-mcp and copy the folder into ~/.claude/skills/, or the file into ~/.claude/agents/.

What Orchestra MCP does

Claude Code skill — a measured field guide to the Orchestra MCP tools: how they fail silently, which server and identity you hold, how to verify before you write. npx skills add ForgePlan/orchestra-mcp

Alternatives in Development

Mempalace Init — Set up MemPalace — install the package, initialize a palace, register the MCP server with Cursor, and verify e 58.6k ★
Obsidian MCP Server — Read, write, search, and surgically edit Obsidian vault notes, tags, and frontmatter via MCP 686 ★
Verify Theme — Run the full Graphite quality gate (drift, tokens, contrast, YAML) and report pass/fail 452 ★

README

orchestra-mcp — a field guide to the Orchestra MCP tools

What the [Orchestra](https://orch.so) MCP tools do, what they quietly **do not** do, and how to tell which server and whose identity you are holding before you write anything.

Everything here was measured against a running server, not read from documentation.

What this is for

Orchestra fails **silently** in more ways than it fails loudly: a write returns success with a rejection list buried inside it, a board query returns 128 of 147 tasks with no error, a delete hangs to timeout and then keeps hanging for every delete after it, a thread accepts a reply that no read will ever return. None of that is guessable. This skill is the catalogue.

It is deliberately **methodology-free**. It answers "why did this call behave that way". It never says which task to take, when a task is done, or how work should be organised — that belongs to whatever runbook you use.

Install

# Global (recommended):
npx skills add ForgePlan/orchestra-mcp -g

# Project-only:
npx skills add ForgePlan/orchestra-mcp

Installs as `orchestra-mcp`.

What is inside

File	What is in it
`SKILL.md`	the router — which question goes to which reference
`references/failure-modes.md`	every way Orchestra fails silently; what is unreachable from MCP; what does not exist in the product
`references/query-cookbook.md`	filtering, sweeps, cost control, and how to cross-check a count before you report it
`references/fields.md`	value shapes on read and write, the two-containers trap, field types never to create
`references/entities.md`	creating, updating, checklists, messages, deleting
`references/rendering.md`	why written markdown never reads back identical
`scripts/orch-verify.sh`	deterministic server resolution + write handshake — exit 0 means safe to write
`scripts/field-map.sh`	dumps the field and option UID map from a running Orchestra