grove skills grove skills

skills is a command-line tool for managing and distributing context-aware instructions (skills) to local AI agent runtimes. It aggregates prompt fragments from multiple sources—embedded defaults, user configurations, and workspace notebooks—and synchronizes them to provider-specific directories.

Core Mechanisms

Tiered Discovery: The tool resolves skills by querying sources in a specific precedence order. A skill defined in a higher-precedence source overrides one with the same name from a lower source:

  1. Project Notebook: Skills defined in the current project’s nb workspace (.../notebooks/nb/workspaces/<project>/skills/).
  2. Ecosystem Notebook: Skills defined in the parent ecosystem’s notebook.
  3. User Configuration: Skills stored in ~/.config/grove/skills/ (or XDG_CONFIG_HOME).
  4. Built-in: Default skills embedded directly in the skills binary.

Provider Abstraction: skills normalizes the installation targets for supported agents. It reads a standardized SKILL.md format (containing YAML frontmatter and Markdown instructions) and writes it to the filesystem location required by the specific runtime (e.g., .claude/skills for Claude Code or .opencode/skill for OpenCode).

Ecosystem Synchronization: When executed from an ecosystem root with the --ecosystem flag, the tool iterates through all child projects defined in the workspace. It pushes relevant skills to each project’s configuration directory, ensuring consistent agent behavior across a monorepo or multi-project environment.

Supported Providers

skills manages configurations for the following local runtimes:

  • Claude Code: Installs to .claude/skills/ (Project scope) or ~/.claude/skills/ (User scope).
  • Codex: Installs to .codex/skills/ or /etc/codex/skills/ (Admin scope).
  • OpenCode: Installs to .opencode/skill/.

Features

  • skills list: Displays available skills and their origin source (e.g., builtin, user, project).
  • skills install: Installs a specific skill to a target scope and provider. Validates the SKILL.md frontmatter to ensure required fields (name, description) exist.
  • skills sync: Performs a bulk installation of all discoverable skills.
    • --here: Syncs all skills to the current directory’s Git root (useful for worktrees).
    • --ecosystem: Distributes skills to all projects within the current ecosystem.
    • --prune: Removes skills from the destination that no longer exist in the source.
  • skills remove: Deletes an installed skill from the specified scope.