agent-skills CLAUDE.md

Repo guide

Assembles Claude Code skills and agents from layered source dirs into ~/.claude/{skills,agents} as symlinks. See README.md for the full model (layers, profiles, machines, clients) and make help for every target.

Also supports other LLMs and harnesses such as Codex, Gemini, Pi, and OpenRouter that can use the same skills and agents. See README.md for the full model.

After changing skills or agents

The active dirs hold symlinks into this repo, so editing files inside an existing skill/agent is live immediately — no re-apply needed. But adding, renaming, or removing a skill/agent dir changes the set of symlinks, so re-apply:

• make validate-skills — check skill metadata, catalog parity, and local references
• make test-validate-skills — run the validator's fixture suite after validator changes
• make dry-run — preview what would change (read-only)
• make apply — (re)create the symlinks; run after a new / renamed / removed unit
• make doctor — check for broken or duplicate links
• make apply-codex — same for Codex (skips agents)

make apply cleans and re-applies all managed symlinks each run, leaving your own non-managed skills/agents untouched. Options (PROFILE, MACHINE, CLIENTS, FORCE) are in README.md.

Documentation placement

Keep public user, contributor, and component-contract documentation beside its component. Keep generated or disposable output under ignored /.artifacts/; do not commit raw run output without an explicit retention decision. Mark superseded durable records with their replacement, not a generic archive folder.

Authoring conventions

• A skill is skills/<name>/SKILL.md; declare model-tier (economy, standard, or premium) plus effort (low, medium, high, or xhigh), version, and author in frontmatter. Avoid hard-coding provider/model IDs in shared skills — the exception is an optional floating model: alias (haiku/sonnet/opus) as a Claude Code routing hint; agents omit it because Pi may honor model: in agent files. See MODEL_ROUTING.md and README.md for the add-a-skill steps.
• Add one alphabetical description row to skills/README.md for every new skill.
• Prefer small executable shell scripts for simple command wrappers and orchestration. Use Python 3.10+ when structured-data processing, state management, subprocess control, or shell quoting would otherwise make the implementation difficult to test or maintain. Keep Python helpers standard-library-only unless an additional dependency is explicitly justified and documented.
• Keep scripts focused, composable, and governed by narrow command-line or JSON contracts. When multiple skills need the same behavior, give one skill an authoritative helper and invoke it from the consumers instead of copying implementations. Keep skill-specific behavior local rather than creating premature shared abstractions.
• Document required runtimes and external commands in the owning SKILL.md, including whether the skill fails clearly or degrades gracefully when a dependency is unavailable.