Open orchestrator
Tholo, an open orchestrator that pulls only the skills a task needs.
It turns a large skill catalog into a focused build, pulling only what a task needs.
What is Tholo?
Tholo is an open orchestrator for the Claude Skills catalog, built by RampStack. It reads the catalog, plans a build task, and selects only the skills the task needs, then prepares the work to hand to Claude Code.
The idea
Select, do not load everything.
A skill catalog that grows past a few dozen entries develops two failures. Skills start to clash, more than one looks applicable and they pull the work in different directions. And loading the whole catalog to do one task floods the context with skills the task will never use.
Tholo addresses both by selecting. It scores the catalog against the task, honors each skill's own stated boundaries to de-conflict overlaps, and returns the small relevant set, not the whole library.
When a task is too broad to narrow, Tholo says so rather than dumping everything. When nothing fits, it says that rather than forcing a pick.
What Tholo does
Five jobs, each shaped by the catalog and the stop.
Reads the catalog.
Enumerates the skills, their descriptions, categories, and the when-to-use and when-NOT-to-use boundaries each skill declares.
Plans a task.
Decomposes a build task into steps, each a coherent unit of work the catalog has skills for.
Selects per step.
Scores the catalog against each step and picks only the relevant skills, with the inputs each skill needs already gathered into the dispatch.
De-conflicts overlaps.
Uses each skill's own stated boundaries to resolve clashes when more than one skill could apply, so the dispatch reflects the catalog's own declared lanes.
Stops where it should.
When a step is too broad to narrow, Tholo asks rather than guesses. And it never runs the build itself, since running writes files and changes a system.
The stop
It plans, you run.
Tholo prepares the plan and the dispatch, and hands the execute decision to a person. Running a build writes files and changes a system, which is irreversible, so it is the human's call to trigger. The honest stop is the boundary.
Read the code. Read the catalog.
The repo is the working implementation and the worked examples. The catalog is what Tholo runs on. Solutions is how to bring RampStack in to operate it for you.