Skip to main content
doppel-freeze is an agent skill — a set of instructions loaded into Claude, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode, Windsurf, VS Code, or any other compatible agent. Once installed, you trigger it by asking your agent to freeze what you just accomplished. The agent reads the session context, authors the YAML manifests by hand, validates them against the Doppels schemas, and presents the finished contract for your review. The result is a committed, deterministic Capability and Recipe your entire team can replay with zero tokens.
There is no doppels freeze CLI command. Freeze is performed entirely by the agent skill — the agent writes the YAML. The CLI provides doppels validate and doppels run to verify and execute the resulting manifests.

​
Install the skill

Run the install command once per machine or project. After that, every supported agent in that environment gains freeze capabilities.
To target a specific agent instead of all configured agents, pass the -a flag:

​
Trigger a freeze

After completing any repeatable task in your agent session, ask your agent to freeze it. You can phrase the request naturally:
“doppel freeze — turn what we just did into a Capability”
“doppel freeze this as deploy-to-staging”
“freeze the migration we just ran as a reusable Capability”
The agent recognises the intent and begins the freeze workflow immediately.

​
What the skill does

1

Check the CLI is on PATH

The skill verifies that doppels is installed and accessible. If it isn’t, the agent shows you the install instructions before proceeding.
2

Initialise the Doppels space

If your project has no .doppels/ directory yet, the agent runs doppels spaces init to create capabilities/, recipes/, and .doppels/ in the current working directory.
3

Decide what to capture

The agent asks you what to freeze. Each distinct outcome becomes its own Capability — one Capability per thing the session accomplished.
4

Read the session context

The agent inspects the full session: every command run, file touched, input provided, and output produced. Nothing is inferred — only what actually happened is captured.
5

Author the YAML manifests

The agent writes capabilities/<name>.yaml and, where appropriate, recipes/<name>.yaml by hand. There is no generator command — the agent authors the YAML directly based on the session.
6

Validate and test

The agent loops doppels validate and runs doppels run … (when it is safe to do so) until every manifest is clean and the output matches what the session produced.
7

Present the contract for review

The agent shows you the finished Capability and Recipe and waits for your confirmation before treating the freeze as complete.
8

Commit the YAML

Once you confirm, the agent asks you to commit the YAML to your repository. The committed file is the repeatable asset — anyone with it can run the same Capability on their machine.

​
Example: freezing a CSV export

Suppose you just had your agent build a script that fetches the top Hacker News stories and writes them to a CSV. After confirming it works, you say:
“doppel freeze this as hn-top-stories”
The agent produces two files:
Anyone who clones your repository can now run:

​
Use cases

doppel-freeze is useful for any repeatable task you currently re-explain to your agent from scratch. Common examples include:
  • 🗄️ Data pipelines — ETL flows, scheduled ingestion, transformation chains
  • 🔌 API integrations — authenticated fetches, webhook handlers, sync jobs
  • 🕸️ Web scraping — structured extraction with pagination and retry logic
  • 📊 Report generation — templated outputs from live data sources
  • 🔀 Data transforms — reshaping, filtering, enriching datasets
  • 🛠️ DevOps tasks — deploys, rollbacks, environment setup scripts
  • 🗃️ Database migrations — schema changes, seed scripts, backups
  • 🚀 Build & release scripts — version bumps, changelog generation, publish flows

​
After the freeze

Once the YAML is committed to your repository, it becomes a permanent, shareable asset:
  • Anyone on your team can run the same Capability with doppels run — no agent required, zero tokens consumed.
  • Every run produces an auditable log under .doppels/runs/<id>/ with full step-by-step output.
  • Credentials stay local — Doppels inherits your host auth (aws, gcloud, psql, SSH, VPN). Nothing is sent to the cloud.
Run doppels validate immediately after the freeze completes and before you commit. A clean validation confirms the schema is correct and the manifests are ready to replay.