Waterbear — Development skill for Claude Code

the session that refuses to die.

keep a claude --remote-control session alive through crashes, patches, quits, and reboots, and resume the same conversation when it comes back.

---

Named for the [tardigrade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade) (the "water bear"): the animal that suspends its life under stress and revives when conditions return. Same trick, for a Claude Code session. A crash, a patch, a quit, or a reboot kills the process; waterbear brings it back on its own, and (optionally) resumes the exact prior conversation from disk so it returns as itself, mid-thought.

waterbear is local to one machine: it wires a launchd LaunchAgent + tmux + a `claude` CLI process on one mac, tied to that machine and user. It does not run in the cloud or follow you to another box.

agents: start here

The whole thing is one sentence you paste to your agent:

install the skill at https://github.com/royashbrook/waterbear, then use it to waterbear yourself

The agent clones the repo, reads [`SKILL.md`](SKILL.md), and wires the durable body around this exact conversation. The one thing you provide is the wake prompt that re-establishes it on respawn (a role or persona cue). It handles tmux, launchd, and the resume wiring itself.

To keep waterbear as a reusable skill in future sessions, clone it into the skills dir instead, then restart your UI so it loads (after