stenyan[.]dev

I built @stefafafan/skm, a tool for managing Agent Skills.

The problem

Agent Skills are basically collections of prompts stored in a specific directory, but I had a vague concern that once everyone starts publishing a massive number of Agent Skills, managing them will become a mess (actually it already is).

• You copy files into places like .agents/skills or .claude/skills, and after a while you can no longer tell which files came from where or when you added them
  • You also have no idea whether updates are available
• From what I understand, agents decide whether to trigger a skill by reading the name and description, but we do not have strict restrictions on the naming of skills.

What I tried with @stefafafan/skm

I approached it like package management in npm. Inspired by package.json and package-lock.json, I tried managing skills with skills.json and skills.lock.json.

• You can add skills with skm add stefafafan/skills
  • The actual skill files are still stored in places like .agents/skills, but skills.json records where they came from (i.e. the source GitHub repository)
• You can rename skills with skm rename old-name new-name
  • This lets you align skill names to your own preferred naming convention
  • Right now this just rewrites the skill directory name and the name metadata. That could possibly become a problem if skills ever end up depending on each other, but it is as-is for now.

Other thoughts

• After coming up with the idea, I've fully embraced agentic coding and finished it quickly, but I also ended up not fully understanding the code being produced.
  • Later I asked for refactoring and fixes for edge cases.
• I had never published an npm package before, so it was nice to experience the release process.
• For some reason my library started getting regular downloads immediately after publishing, which made me wonder what was going on: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@stefafafan/skm?activeTab=versions
• I also published a brand site: https://getskm.dev/
  • This is the kind of result I got by using Codex and frontend-skill
  • Cloudflare Workers and Astro were used to build the site.
• I realized afterward that similar libraries already existed
  • https://github.com/pi0/skillman: a wrapper around vercel-labs/skills, with the same idea of managing things through skills.json. It does not seem to have features like recording which version of a skill was downloaded or providing a rename command, which are the features I implemented.
  • https://github.com/reorx/skm: the name overlaps with mine, but this one seems intended for managing global skills. It is written in Python.