The grimoire

📖 The Grimoire — One Spell to Find All Spells

You hold the index to a Book of Spells: a large, growing library of skills ("spells") transcribed from many providers. The spells themselves are not loaded into your context — there may be hundreds or thousands of them, far more than would fit. Instead, this single skill teaches you to discover and summon exactly the spell you need, the moment you need it.

This is how you learn your own magical abilities. When the user bids you cast a spell, or a task smells like something a specialised spell would handle — a cloud service, a deployment, a design tool, a file format, a third-party API — come here first. To cast a spell is to consult this index.

Companion keystones — this one index routes to them all

You need tether only this spell. The Book's other native keystones are reached straight through the catalogue below — no separate install — so route here first, then open the one the task calls for:

• Find a spell — the rite on this page (discover and load a gathered spell).
• Author a spell — read the-spellwright (forge a new SKILL.md).
• Find / connect an MCP server — an Emissary of the Pact — read the-emissary (search the live MCP Registry and propose a connection).
• Install the Book into a conduit — read the-tether (symlink this keystone into the agent's skills directory).

To open any of them, grep the catalogue for its name and read the path it gives, exactly as you would any spell.

Where the Book lies

Relative to this SKILL.md, the Book sits one level up. The catalogue is hierarchical so you never need read it whole:

• ../skills/INDEX.md — tiny: just the houses and their spell counts. Safe to read whole; stays small no matter how large the Book grows.
• ../skills/_index/<house>.md — one house's spells (e.g. google.md, openai.md), each with a one-line description and the exact read-path of its SKILL.md. Bounded reads, one drawer at a time.
• ../skills/catalog.json — the full machine-readable ledger: [{ "name", "provider", "description", "path" }, …]. Grep or jq it; do not read it whole.
• ../skills/<house>/<spell>/SKILL.md — each spell in full, nested under its house, alongside any references/, scripts/, or assets/ it needs. The folder isn't always guessable from the name, so read the path the index line gives you rather than assembling it yourself.

(If this skill was installed by symlink, those paths resolve into the book-of-spells repository it points at.)

The Rite of Wielding

1. Seek. Never read the whole catalogue — it may hold thousands of spells. Grep the per-house indexes (or the json) for the user's intent:

   grep -ri "bigquery"  ../skills/_index/          # all houses at once
   grep -i  "deploy"    ../skills/_index/google.md  # one house, if known
   

   Search by capability ("deploy", "pdf", "screenshot"), by provider ("google", "openai"), or by the exact name the user spoke. Read ../skills/INDEX.md (tiny) only to see which houses exist.

2. Choose. Read the matching descriptions and pick the best-fitting spell. If several fit, prefer the most specific; if none fit, say so plainly and proceed without one rather than forcing a poor match.

3. Read in full. Open that spell's own file and read it completely before acting. Every index line ends with "read at …" — a transcribed spell at ../skills/<house>/<spell>/SKILL.md, a keystone (e.g. the-spellwright) at its own root path. Follow that path verbatim; don't assemble one from the name. The one-line index description is only a signpost; the spell's true instructions, guardrails, and helper scripts live in its own SKILL.md.

4. Wield. Follow the spell's instructions faithfully, including any scripts/ or references/ it directs you to. Honour its safety wards.

5. Name your source. When a spell shapes your work, tell the user which one you invoked (e.g. "following the google-bigquery-basics spell"), so they can trace and trust the working.

Wards

• Discover before improvising. If a fitting spell exists, read and follow it rather than inventing your own approach from memory.
• A signpost is not the spell. Never act on the index description alone — always open the full SKILL.md.
• No fitting spell? Say so. Don't twist an unrelated spell to a task it wasn't written for. An honest "the Book holds nothing for this" is a valid outcome.

The Book is large, and you need carry none of it — only the knowing of how to open it. 🕯️