claude-relay

What This Skill Does

The claude-relay skill acts as an orchestration layer for the Claude Code CLI, leveraging tmux to provide persistent, multi-project terminal sessions. Rather than running ephemeral commands, this skill creates a background state for each project, allowing you to maintain context, initiate complex tasks, and retrieve output asynchronously. It abstracts the complexities of managing tmux sessions, project path resolution, and CLI interaction, serving as a reliable transport agent for your development workflow.

Installation

To install the skill, run clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/artwalker/claude-relay. Once installed, you must create a projects.map file in the skill directory to map shorthand names to absolute project paths. Ensure that both tmux and the claude binary are present in your system PATH. The skill relies on specific environment variables—notably CLAUDE_RELAY_ROOT—to locate your working directories. Verify your installation by running scripts/relay.sh with no arguments to check the help menu and status.

Use Cases

This skill is ideal for developers managing multiple active coding sessions simultaneously. For example, if you are context-switching between a backend service and a frontend UI, you can keep both Claude Code instances alive in the background. It is also perfect for long-running refactors where you need to check on progress periodically without keeping a terminal window pinned to your screen. By using the tail functionality, you can query for status updates or recent output from your background agent at any time, streamlining your development velocity.

Example Prompts

1. "Start a new Claude session for the 'billing-service' project and ask it to list all files in the src/routes directory."
2. "Send a request to the 'auth-api' session to refactor the login controller to use the new middleware structure."
3. "Check the current status and tail the last 50 lines of output for the 'dashboard-frontend' project session."

Tips & Limitations

• Project Resolution: If you have many projects, rely on the projects.map file for explicit aliasing to avoid ambiguity during path resolution.
• Session Management: Always use stop when you are finished with a project to free up system resources, as tmux sessions persist until explicitly killed.
• Output Monitoring: The RELAY_WAIT variable is set to 6 seconds by default. If your project has slow compilation or response times, consider increasing this variable.
• Scope: Remember that claude-relay is a transport tool. It facilitates interaction with the Claude Code binary but does not perform internal code analysis itself; the quality of the output depends entirely on the Claude Code installation and the complexity of your prompts.