Mise en place for your agents.

What is Skillet?

Skills are structured files that teach AI agents how to accomplish specific tasks. Getting them installed across different agent environments — Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, generic agents — requires detecting the right tool, resolving the right path, handling updates, and presenting a consistent experience. Every skill author would have to build that from scratch.

Skillet solves this once. Authors ship a small npm package powered by @skillet-cli/core; end users run it to install, update, and uninstall skills in any agent environment.

Design Principles

• One dependency ships a complete installer. Add @skillet-cli/core to your package, call run(). The CLI, prompts, adapters, drift detection, and UX are all included. Nothing else to wire up.
• Standard package distribution. Skills ship as npm packages — via GitHub Package Registry, npmjs.com, or any compatible registry. Skillet adds an installer, not a new distribution channel. Your existing publish workflow is enough.
• UX is skillet's job, not yours. Scope selection, auto-detection of agent environments, drift detection, update prompts, rich terminal output — everything that makes an installer feel polished comes out of the box. Write great skills; let skillet handle the rest.
• Broad reach that expands over time. Skillet ships with adapters for Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and generic agents. As the ecosystem grows, so does adapter support — without changes to your skill.

Using Skillet

When you install a skill published with @skillet-cli/core, you get four commands:

my-skill install     # Install the skill into detected agent environments
my-skill update      # Update an installed skill, preserving local modifications
my-skill list        # Show installed locations and drift status
my-skill uninstall   # Remove the skill from selected locations

Scopes — skills install at two granularities:

• user — installs to your home directory; available across every project
• project — installs to the current directory; scoped to that repo

The installer detects which agent tools are present and pre-selects them. You can confirm the defaults or choose a different target.

Building with @skillet-cli/core

Use @skillet-cli/core to ship your skill as an npm package with a complete CLI — so your users can install, update, and uninstall it in any agent environment with a single command, whether that's Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or any other agent.

Quick start: Run npm create skillet in your project directory. The interactive wizard detects defaults from your git config and existing files, prompts for the rest, and scaffolds everything for you — skip straight to step 4.

1. Create your package

Initialize a directory with a package.json. Publishing via GitHub Package Registry requires no separate npm account:

{
  "name": "@your-github-username/my-skill",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "type": "module",
  "bin": { "my-skill": "bin/cli.js" },
  "publishConfig": { "registry": "https://npm.pkg.github.com" }
}

2. Add your skill files

Place your prompt files in a skill/ directory.

3. Wire up the CLI

Install the library:

npm install @skillet-cli/core

Create bin/cli.js — this is your entire CLI:

#!/usr/bin/env node
import { createRequire } from 'node:module';
import { fileURLToPath } from 'node:url';
import { run } from '@skillet-cli/core';

const pkg = createRequire(import.meta.url)('../package.json');
await run({ skillDir: fileURLToPath(new URL('../skill', import.meta.url)), pkg });

4. Publish

Authenticate with GitHub Package Registry once, then publish:

npm login --registry=https://npm.pkg.github.com
npm publish

Your users configure the registry for your scope once, then install via npx:

npm config set @your-github-username:registry https://npm.pkg.github.com
npx @your-github-username/my-skill install

Skillet detects their agent environment and puts the skill in the right place.

Publishing to npm instead

If you'd rather publish to the public npm registry, remove publishConfig from your package.json and run npm publish. Your users can then run npx @your-github-username/my-skill install with no registry setup.

RunOptions

Option	Type	Description
skillDir	string	Path to the directory containing your skill files
pkg	{ name: string; version: string }	Your package's name and version (used by the update notifier)
hooks.transform	(skill: NormalizedSkill) => NormalizedSkill	Modify the normalized skill before adapter dispatch; may be async
hooks.beforeInstall	(skill: NormalizedSkill, adapter: Adapter, ctx: Context) => void	Run before each adapter install; may be async
hooks.afterInstall	(skill: NormalizedSkill, adapter: Adapter, ctx: Context) => void	Run after each adapter install; may be async
hooks.extendProgram	(program: Command, ctx: Record<string, unknown>) => void	Add custom subcommands to the CLI (Command is from commander)

All hooks fields are optional. NormalizedSkill, Adapter, and Context are TypeScript types exported from @skillet-cli/core.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for dev setup, scripts, commit format, and the release process.