active-skills

The source of truth for a curated set of agent skills, used by Claude Code and Antigravity.

This repository holds skills and nothing else. It is not a plugin and is not installed directly. Skills reach users through the active-skills plugin in mlarkin00/plugins, which mirrors this repo automatically.

Clone this repo to write skills. Install the plugin to use them.

How a skill gets from here to users

edit a skill → push to main
    → notify-marketplace.yml pings mlarkin00/plugins
    → sync-active-skills.yml mirrors the skills into the plugin,
      bumps its version, tags, and releases
    → the next marketplace update delivers it

There is nothing to bump and nothing to release here. The plugin owns its own version and the sync bumps it on every change, so a skill edit cannot get stranded by a forgotten version bump.

If the dispatch fails or the token is missing, a daily poll at 06:17 UTC picks the change up instead. Nothing is lost; it just arrives later.

Authoring

A skill is a top-level directory containing a SKILL.md. That is the entire contract, and it is exactly what the sync selects on.

systematic-debugging/
├── SKILL.md              ← required; this is what makes it a skill
├── references/
└── scripts/

Anything inside a skill directory travels with it — scripts/, references/, evals/, assets/, whatever the skill needs.

Anything at the repo root that is not a directory with a SKILL.md is skipped by the sync. So README.md, .github/, and any future docs/ or drafts/ stay here and never ship. You can add non-skill content freely.

The one trap: a directory with a missing or misspelled SKILL.md is silently skipped, not flagged — the skill simply never appears for users. The sync logs what it skipped as a notice on its run, which is where to look when a new skill doesn't show up.

Check what will ship before you push:

for d in */; do [ -f "$d/SKILL.md" ] && echo "ship  ${d%/}" || echo "SKIP  ${d%/}"; done

Deletions propagate too — the mirror uses --delete, so removing a skill here removes it from the plugin. A rename is a delete plus an add.

Publishing

Push to main. That's all.

Installing

Install the plugin, not this repo.

Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add mlarkin00/plugins
/plugin install active-skills@mlarkin00-plugins

Skills are namespaced under the plugin, e.g. active-skills:systematic-debugging.

Antigravity — clone the marketplace repo once, then bulk-install from it:

git clone https://github.com/mlarkin00/plugins
agy plugin install ./plugins

Pointing agy plugin install at a directory holding several plugins reports Found bulk plugins directory and installs them all, this one included.

A note on the old layout

Skills used to live under a skills/ subdirectory here, and this repo used to be a plugin itself, carrying both runtimes' manifests. Both are gone — skills sit at the root, and all plugin machinery lives in mlarkin00/plugins. If you have a local tool or symlink pointing at active-skills/skills/, repoint it at the repo root.