Cross-harness skills for Tribal, semantic compression for project knowledge.
Harnesses without native support for the skills specification (Claude Code among them) need their config directory to exist first; the CLI won't create it. Create it, then add the skills:
mkdir -p .claude/skills
npx skills add tribal-memory/skills.claude/skills is project scope; use ~/.claude/skills for a global install. The first npx skills run downloads the skills CLI; accept the prompt. After installing, restart your harness session so it loads the new skills.
The skills CLI wires the skills into your harness. Both register without further configuration; each activates when its triggers fire.
| Skill | When it activates | What it teaches |
|---|---|---|
installing-tribal |
First setup, switching transports, re-wiring after a harness change | Binary install paths, tribal bootstrap, tribal check, MCP config wire-up |
using-tribal |
Day-to-day ingest, query, traverse, diagnose | What Tribal is for, how ingests are phrased, discover and explore patterns, the diagnostic primitive |
Per-harness wire-up references cover Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Antigravity, and OpenCode. Other harnesses supported by the skills CLI consume Tribal's canonical tribal mcp-config output directly.
skills/
├── installing-tribal/
│ ├── SKILL.md
│ └── references/ # bootstrap-output, consent, failure-modes, harnesses/, platforms, providers, tribal-check-remediation
└── using-tribal/
├── SKILL.md
└── references/ # bootstrap-output, failure-modes, mcp-tools, tacit-knowledge, tribal-check-remediation
Each skill is self-contained: its references live inside its own directory, so they travel with npx skills add (a skill installs its directory, not the whole repo). The skill bodies are the entry points; the reference files carry the depth and are loaded on demand. tribal-check-remediation, failure-modes, and bootstrap-output appear in both skills by design, since each must stand alone; a CI check keeps the shared copies in sync.
Tribal stores tacit, semantic, and procedural knowledge: the why behind decisions, the ways of working a team has converged on, and the breakthroughs that surface during real engineering work. The kind of context that walks out the door when a teammate leaves.
For the binary, install paths, and the full project surface, see tribal-memory/tribal.
Contributions are welcome for:
- New harness wire-up references under
skills/installing-tribal/references/harnesses/<harness>.md. - Real-world footgun additions to
failure-modes.md(it lives in both skills and must stay in sync; the CI check enforces this). - Phrasing patterns and worked transformations in
skills/using-tribal/references/tacit-knowledge.md.
Open a pull request; the structure and editorial conventions live in the existing files.
CC-BY-4.0. Use, modify, and redistribute with attribution.