~/.chatcli/skills/ on startup. Previously skills only existed in the project’s .agent/skills/ (visible only inside the repo checkout) or via skills.sh (opt-in remote install) — a user installing via go install/brew had no skills at all. Now they ship by default.
Inspired by hermes-agent’s skill spectrum, but each skill is rewritten for ChatCLI’s own tools (
@coder/Bash, @webfetch/@websearch, @send, @scheduler, @read/@search) — no third-party closed infra. Keyless-first and OS-agnostic (branches for macOS, Linux and Windows).How seeding works
On startup,pkg/persona/builtin materializes each embedded SKILL.md into ~/.chatcli/skills/<name>/. It is idempotent and edit-safe via a content-hash manifest (.builtin-manifest.json):
| Situation | Action |
|---|---|
| Skill missing | install |
| Unedited but stale (new release) | refresh |
| User-edited | preserve (never clobber) |
| Already current | nothing |
Included skills
Productivity & systemsend-message · email · calendar · reminders · notes · imessage
Research & knowledge
web-research · arxiv · obsidian · huggingface
Documents & media
pdf-tools · ocr · youtube · presentations · paper-writing · mermaid-diagrams · ascii-art
Location & home
maps (OpenStreetMap/OSRM, keyless) · hue-lights (local bridge, keyless)
Dev & data
github (gh CLI) · jupyter · webhooks
Services (user’s own token)
notion · linear · airtable
Meta
skill-authoring — teaches the agent to author and evolve its own skills
Auto-activation
Each skill declarestriggers: in frontmatter; when a user phrase matches a trigger, the skill is injected into context automatically (FindAutoActivatedSkills). You can also invoke one manually via /<skill-name>.
Related
- Skill Authoring (@skill) — create, evolve, stats and packs
- Skill Registry (skills.sh) — install community skills
- Customizable Agents