Genie Hacks
These aren’t theoretical. They’re patterns from real Genie users solving real problems — tested in production, not in blog posts. Every one of these cost someone a late night. Learn from our pain. What is a hack? Something non-obvious that makes Genie faster, cheaper, or more capable. The stuff we wish we’d known on day one. How to browse: Scan below, or use/genie-hacks search <keyword> to find what you need.
Got one we missed? Submit it — or argue about it on Discord.
Provider switching
Use the right model for the right job
Teams & coordination
Multi-agent speed and org-scale patterns
Skills & automation
Batch runs and custom workflows
Hooks & integration
Event-driven automation and external tools
Provider switching
Hack 1: Provider Switching for Speed vs Safety
Problem: You want fast iteration during development but thorough review before merging. Using the same model for both wastes time or misses bugs. Solution: Use--provider and --model flags on genie spawn to assign different models to different roles. Fast models (Sonnet, Codex) handle implementation; capable models (Opus) handle review and architecture.
Hack 2: BYOA (Bring Your Own API) for Domain Expertise
Problem: Your project has domain-specific patterns (ML pipelines, blockchain contracts, embedded systems) that general models handle poorly. You want to use a fine-tuned or specialized model. Solution: Configure a custom provider in your Genie setup that points to any OpenAI-compatible API. Genie’s provider system is model-agnostic — anything that speaks the chat completions protocol works.Teams & coordination
Hack 3: Pipeline Parallelization
Problem: A wish with 6 execution groups takes forever when run sequentially. Each group takes 10-15 minutes, so the total is over an hour. Solution: Structure your wish with independent execution groups and let Genie’s/work orchestrator dispatch them in parallel waves. Groups without dependencies run simultaneously.
Hack 4: Multi-Team Coordination (Org-Scale)
Problem: You have multiple wishes in flight across different parts of the codebase. Teams step on each other, cause merge conflicts, and duplicate work. Solution: Use separate worktrees per team — Genie does this automatically withgenie team create. Each team gets an isolated git worktree branching from dev, so they can’t interfere with each other. Coordinate merges through the /dream orchestrator which handles dependency ordering.
/dream orchestrator handles merge ordering so dependent wishes merge in the right sequence.
When to use: When you have 2+ wishes that touch different parts of the codebase. Essential for teams running overnight batch execution where merge order matters.
Skills & automation
Hack 5: Overnight Batch Execution
Problem: You have 5 approved wishes queued up. Running them one-by-one during work hours wastes your time monitoring agents. Solution: Use the/dream skill to batch-execute SHIP-ready wishes overnight. Dream picks wishes from your brainstorm backlog, builds a dependency-ordered plan, spawns parallel agents, reviews PRs, and produces a wake-up report.
See the /dream skill reference for the full phase breakdown and configuration options.
Hack 6: Custom Skill for Repeated Workflows
Problem: You keep typing the same sequence of commands for a recurring task — like running migrations, seeding test data, and restarting the dev server. It’s error-prone and tedious to explain each time. Solution: Create a custom skill file. Skills are just Markdown with YAML frontmatter — drop a file inskills/<name>/SKILL.md and it becomes a slash command instantly. No code, no registration, no build step.
See Skills concept guide for frontmatter options and trigger configuration.
Hooks & integration
Hack 7: Auto-Spawn on Wish Creation
Problem: After creating a wish with/wish, you still have to manually create a team and spawn agents. That’s 2-3 extra commands before work begins.
Solution: Genie’s hook system fires events on every tool use. The auto-spawn handler already restarts crashed agents — you can extend this pattern by adding a hook that listens for wish file creation and automatically kicks off a team.
/wish, describe what you want, and agents start working immediately after the plan is written.
When to use: When you want a fully autonomous pipeline where brainstorming flows directly into execution. Combine with /dream for batch mode.
Hack 8: Slack/Discord Integration via NATS Hooks
Problem: You want to monitor agent progress from Slack or Discord instead of watching tmux panes. You also want to trigger agents from chat. Solution: Genie emits events to NATS on every tool call, message delivery, and agent response. Subscribe to these NATS subjects and forward them to your chat platform’s webhook API./dream runs from their phones.
When to use: Remote teams, overnight batch runs, or any scenario where you’re not sitting in front of the terminal. Especially useful with /dream for wake-up notifications.
See the Hooks reference for the full list of NATS subjects and payload formats.
Contributing
Have a hack that’s not here? We want it. The best docs come from people who actually hit the problem.Format
Every hack follows this structure — keep it concrete, skip the theory:Categories
Submit via PR
The fastest way to contribute:/genie-hacks contribute for guided PR creation.
Community
Half-baked idea? Wild theory? Something that worked but you’re not sure why? That’s what Discord is for.Discord
Share hacks, argue about patterns, and help us figure out what’s next.