Finding skills

Finding Skills

Skills on disk at /mnt/skills/user/ are a catalog — too expensive to preload as descriptions in every session's context. This skill is the on-demand accessor, analogous to Anthropic's ToolSearch for MCP tools.

Usage

PY=/home/user/.spokes/claude-skills/finding-skills/scripts/skills.py

# List every skill by name (cheap, ~1.4KB)
python3 "$PY" list

# Search by keyword — ranks name matches above description matches
python3 "$PY" search "adversarial review"

# Load the full SKILL.md of a specific skill
python3 "$PY" show challenging

In a live CCotw session the script lives at /mnt/skills/user/finding-skills/scripts/skills.py.

When to reach for this

• You have a task where a skill might help but no obvious name comes to mind → search <keywords>
• The boot emitted names-only and you want the description of a candidate → show <name>
• You want catalog breadth before picking an approach → list

Pattern

1. search "<what you want to do>" — get 3–10 ranked candidates
2. show <top-pick> — read its SKILL.md
3. Follow the SKILL.md's instructions (which may point at scripts/, references/, etc.)

Stop at step 1 if none of the candidates fit — don't shoehorn an unrelated skill onto the task.

Ranking

• Exact match on skill name: 100
• Substring match on skill name: 10
• Substring match in description: 1 per match (multiple hits compound)

Case-insensitive throughout. Results sorted high-to-low, ties broken by name.

Output format

• list: one skill name per line
• search: tab-separated <name>\t<description (truncated to 200 chars)>, one per line
• show: raw SKILL.md contents to stdout; exit 1 with a stderr message if not found

All three are line-oriented so they compose with grep, head, etc.