| name | ecc-skill-scout |
| description | Use when the user wants to create, build, fork, or find a skill for a workflow, or when a "new" skill idea already feels familiar. Triggers: "does a skill for X already exist", "find me a skill for…", "search skills", "is there a marketplace skill for…", "before I write this skill, check first". |
Skill Scout
Before writing a new skill, search. Most "new" workflow ideas are already a published skill somewhere, possibly in your own skills directory. Finding the existing one is faster, safer (someone else has debugged it), and respects the user's time.
Search order — try in this order
- Local skills directory —
~/.agents/skills/ (global) and <project>/.agents/skills/ (project). These are what the agent can already load. The fastest win is finding a near-match you can adapt in 5 minutes instead of write from scratch in 50.
- Project-specific skills — any in-repo skill manifests,
AGENTS.md skill tables, package manifests, or workflow docs that describe "how we do X here."
- The marketplace / catalog — Anthropic's
skills.sh (https://skills.sh), the openai/skills repo, or any installed agent's skill browser.
- GitHub —
github.com/search?q=SKILL.md+<keyword>&type=code. Many skills live in personal repos before they make it to a marketplace.
- Web search — fallback. Skills aren't always indexed well; use specific terms from the workflow.
What to extract when you find a match
- The
description field — that's the most-curated, most-stable part of a skill. It tells you exactly when the original author wanted it triggered.
- The trigger phrases / keywords in the body.
- Any test fixtures or examples the original author shipped (these are gold — they encode the author's mental model of "what good output looks like").
- License. Most skills are MIT; some are AGPL or custom. Don't republish a non-MIT skill into a closed-source product without thinking.
When to skip the search
- The user explicitly says "I know this doesn't exist; build it anyway."
- The skill is genuinely project-specific (encodes this repo's specific decisions) and won't generalize.
- The skill is 5 lines or less — searching takes longer than writing.
When the search returns "nothing"
- Check spelling. "caveman", "caveman-comms", "ultra-compressed" are all real names for similar ideas.
- Look for the workflow's primitive, not its name. A skill for "terse responses" might be filed under "communication", "voice", "output-format", or "tldr".
- Check the user's prior skills directory. They may have written a private version of this six months ago.
Output format
When you find a match, present:
Found: <repo/url>, <skill-name>
- Description: <1-line>
- License: <MIT/etc.>
- Trigger: <when to load>
- Fit: drop-in / adapt / partial / reference-only
- Effort to ship: <1h / half-day / full-day>
Source / license
Adapted from mattpocock/ECC · skill-scout, MIT.
