using-skill-engine

Using the skill engine

This is the entry-point skill. It detects whether the current directory holds a contextualizer that has already been set up, and routes to the matching workflow.

Routing

When invoked, do the following in order. A contextualizer is installed at one of three install levels: ~/.claude/skills/, ~/.claude/local/skills/, or <repo>/.claude/skills/ at the project level. The project level is not only the directory sitting at the repository root — it reaches any nested .claude/skills/ below it, so a contextualizer can live beside the slice of the code it describes. A contextualizer's research/.research-state.json is the canonical setup-state marker.

Resolve what is installed with the script in shared/locator-block.md, the engine's one root-resolution definition — this skill does not carry a root list of its own. The script exits on both the nothing-found and the several-found-and- none-named paths, so it leaves no count behind in a variable; run it with its enumeration flag and read its stdout instead:

ctx_all=$(bash -s -- --all <<'LOCATOR'
# …the fenced script from shared/locator-block.md, verbatim, with its
# name="<name>" line substituted to name="" …
LOCATOR
) && ctx_count=$(printf '%s\n' "$ctx_all" | grep -c '^/' || true) || ctx_count=0
[ "$ctx_count" -gt 0 ] || ctx_all=""
ctx_root=$(printf '%s\n' "$ctx_all" | head -n1)

Exit 0 means the enumeration printed one absolute path per line, and ctx_count is that line count. Any non-zero exit means none was found, so ctx_count is 0 and what landed on stdout is the script's own diagnostic sentence rather than a path — which is why ctx_all is cleared on that branch before anything reads it.

Pending-proposal pre-step (runs before case dispatch)

Before dispatching to a workflow, check for pending proposals — any *-context.proposed/ directory that DISCOVER or REFRESH left behind. A proposal is always staged as a sibling of the live contextualizer it was derived from, so the enumeration above is most of the input this needs: the install roots it names, deduplicated, are what gets searched. Each root is searched once, and the three fixed roots are searched whether or not the enumeration reached them: