| name | review-a-skill |
| description | Use when evaluating whether a skill belongs in a library. Preview content, check frontmatter, validate structure, and decide whether to keep, curate, or remove. |
| category | workflow |
| version | 4.1.0 |
Review A Skill
Goal
Evaluate a single skill's quality, relevance, and safety before it enters or stays in a library.
Guardrails
- Always use
--format json for machine-readable output in automated pipelines.
- Always use
--fields to limit output size when inspecting catalog entries.
- Always use
--dry-run before curating or removing a skill.
- Never remove a skill without first checking if other skills depend on it via
info --format json dependencies.
Workflow
- Preview the skill content to check for quality and safety.
npx ai-agent-skills preview <skill-name>
The preview command sanitizes content — if it flags sanitization, investigate before proceeding.
- Inspect the catalog entry for metadata completeness.
npx ai-agent-skills info <skill-name> --format json --fields name,description,tags,collections,dependencies
- Validate the skill's SKILL.md structure.
npx ai-agent-skills validate <skill-name>
- If the skill needs curation (notes, collections, verification):
npx ai-agent-skills curate <skill-name> --notes "Reviewed: solid patterns" --verify --dry-run
npx ai-agent-skills curate <skill-name> --notes "Reviewed: solid patterns" --verify
- If the skill should be removed:
npx ai-agent-skills curate <skill-name> --remove --dry-run
npx ai-agent-skills curate <skill-name> --remove --yes
Decision Criteria
- Keep: Clear description, valid frontmatter, useful to the library's audience, no injection patterns.
- Curate: Needs better whyHere, collection placement, or verification status.
- Remove: Duplicate, outdated, broken source, or contains suspicious content.
Gotchas
- The
preview command only works for vendored (house) skills. Upstream skills show description and whyHere only.
- The
validate command checks frontmatter structure but not content quality — that requires human or agent judgment.
- Removing a skill that other skills depend on will break the dependency graph. Always check
dependencies.usedBy first.
