Pipelines and skills

Ballet prescribes no development process. A project’s process is its pipeline — which stages run and in what order — and its skills — how agents work in each stage.

Pipelines

Pipelines on the project page edits the project’s pipeline. Each stage has an ID, a name, a kind and, for agent stages, the skills it uses (empty: all project skills), the model and a timeout:

agent session

A coding-agent session, e.g. Implement, Review, Verify.

human approval

Waits for a human to approve or reject on the ticket page.

platform (merge)

Merges the pull request through the forge when its gates pass.

Problems are shown as you edit; Publish saves the pipeline as its next version — a ticket keeps the version it started with. History lists the versions, and Load brings an older one back into the editor. A project can also have one pipeline per ticket type (bug, docs, …); tickets use the one named after their type, else default. Export YAML and the YAML tab move pipelines between projects. The format is in Pipelines; the ideas in Ticket Pipeline.

Skills

A skill is a SKILL.md with instructions — branching rules, test approach, documentation duties, review checklists — in the format Claude Code uses. Ballet writes the project’s skills into every session (Skills).

• Skills in the header manages the skills of the platform or an organization: edit a draft, then publish it as the next immutable version. An organization’s skills are private to it.

• A project’s Skills page shows its effective skills (platform, organization and project scopes together). Each can follow the latest version, be pinned to a version, or be disabled for the project.

Because versions are pinned, changing a skill never surprises a running project.