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Skills & Sidecars

Most agent frameworks dump every tool into one shared process. One bad kubectl delete and your whole agent environment is toast. Sympozium does this completely differently.

Isolated Skill Sidecars

Every skill runs in its own sidecar container — a separate, isolated process injected into the agent pod at runtime. Use skills to give agents cluster-admin capabilities (kubectl, helm, scaling) or domain-specific tools — each with ephemeral least-privilege RBAC that's garbage-collected when the run finishes. Toggle a skill on, and the controller automatically:

  • Injects a dedicated sidecar container with only the binaries that skill needs (kubectl, helm, terraform, etc.)
  • Provisions ephemeral, least-privilege RBAC scoped to that single agent run — no standing permissions, no god-roles
  • Shares a /workspace volume so the agent can coordinate with the sidecar
  • Garbage-collects everything when the run finishes — containers, roles, bindings, all gone

"Give the agent tools, not trust." — Whether it's orchestrating a fleet or administering the cluster, skills get exactly the permissions they declare, for exactly as long as the run lasts, and not a second longer.

How Sidecars Are Injected

SympoziumInstance has skills: [k8s-ops]
  → AgentRun created
    → Controller resolves SkillPack "k8s-ops"
      → Finds sidecar: { image: skill-k8s-ops, rbac: [...] }
      → Injects sidecar container into pod
      → Creates Role + RoleBinding (namespace-scoped)
      → Creates ClusterRole + ClusterRoleBinding (cluster-wide access)
    → Pod runs with kubectl + RBAC available
    → On completion/deletion: all skill RBAC cleaned up

Built-in Tools

Every agent pod has these tools available out of the box (no skill sidecar required for native tools):

Tool Type Description
execute_command IPC (sidecar) Execute shell commands (kubectl, bash, curl, jq, etc.) in the skill sidecar container
read_file Native Read file contents from the pod filesystem
write_file Native Create or overwrite files under /workspace or /tmp
list_directory Native List directory contents with type, size, and name
fetch_url Native Fetch web pages or API endpoints. HTML is converted to readable plain text
send_channel_message IPC (bridge) Send a message through a connected channel
schedule_task IPC (bridge) Create, update, suspend, resume, or delete recurring SympoziumSchedule tasks

Note

Native tools run directly in the agent container. IPC tools communicate with sidecars or the IPC bridge via the shared /ipc volume. See the Tool Authoring Guide for how to add your own.

Built-in SkillPacks

SkillPack Category Sidecar Description Status
k8s-ops Kubernetes kubectl, curl, jq Cluster inspection, workload management, troubleshooting, scaling Stable
sre-observability SRE kubectl, curl, jq Prometheus/Loki/Kubernetes observability workflows Alpha
llmfit SRE llmfit, kubectl, jq Node-level model placement analysis Alpha
incident-response SRE yes Structured incident triage — gather context, diagnose root cause, suggest remediation Alpha
code-review Development — Code review guidelines and best practices Alpha
web-endpoint Connectivity web-proxy Expose agents as HTTP APIs — OpenAI-compatible and MCP Alpha

Toggling Skills

# In the TUI: press 's' on an instance → Space to toggle skills
# Or via kubectl:
kubectl patch sympoziuminstance <name> --type=merge \
  -p '{"spec":{"skills":[{"skillPackRef":"k8s-ops"},{"skillPackRef":"llmfit"}]}}'

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