skills-manager

name

skills-manager

description

Manage AI agent skills backup and sync via the skills-manager CLI. Use when the user asks to push skills to GitHub, pull skills from GitHub, link or symlink skills to agents, sync skills across machines, set up project-level skills, or manage the ~/.agents/ directory. Also triggers on "sm push", "sm pull", "sm link", "backup my skills", "restore skills on new machine", "link --project", "project skills setup", "sync agents skills", or any question about the skills-manager or sm CLI.

skills-manager CLI

CLI companion to vercel-labs/skills — backup, restore, and symlink AI agent skills via GitHub.

Scope boundary: This tool backs up and syncs skills you already have. It does NOT install new skills from the registry — that's npx skills add. If the user wants to install a new skill, point them to npx skills add <repo> instead.

Quick Reference

Goal	Command
Backup skills to GitHub	sm push
Restore skills on new machine	sm pull --repo owner/name
Re-link skills to agents	sm link
Link skills to a project	sm link --project

Invocation

# If globally installed
sm push          # short alias
skills-manager push  # full name

# Without installing — use the bundled wrapper script
export SM="$HOME/.agents/skills/skills-manager/scripts/sm.sh"
"$SM" push

Requires Node.js >= 20. GitHub CLI (gh) recommended for auth.

If neither sm nor skills-manager is found, install first:

npm install -g @tc9011/skills-manager

Key Paths

Path	Purpose
~/.agents/	Git repo root (push/pull target)
~/.agents/skills/	Canonical skills directory
~/.agents/.skill-lock.json	Lock file (READ ONLY — owned by vercel-labs/skills)

Authentication

Auth is optional. If git already has credentials configured (SSH keys, macOS Keychain, credential manager, etc.), push/pull work without any extra setup.

When git cannot authenticate on its own, the CLI looks for a token in this order:

1. gh auth token — GitHub CLI (recommended)
2. $GITHUB_TOKEN — environment variable
3. $GH_TOKEN — environment variable

If none are found, git attempts the operation without a token — this works for public repos but fails for private ones.

The link command never requires authentication.

Fixing Auth Failures

If push/pull fails with a permission or authentication error:

1. Check if gh is installed: run gh --version
2. If gh exists: run gh auth login to authenticate, then retry
3. If gh missing: set a token: export GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_your_token_here, then retry
4. If using SSH: ensure ~/.ssh/ has a valid key added to GitHub and origin uses the [e-mail]: URL format

Tokens are used transiently in-memory — they are never persisted to .git/config.

Commands

push

Commit and push ~/.agents/ to GitHub.

sm push                    # auto-generated commit message
sm push -m "add new skill" # custom message

First-time behavior:

1. If ~/.agents/ is not a git repo, auto-runs git init
2. If no origin remote exists, prompts for owner/name
3. If gh CLI is installed, offers to create the repo on GitHub automatically
4. If gh is not installed, shows a note telling the user to create the repo manually at https://github.com/new

Possible outcomes:

• Skills pushed successfully! — new commit created and pushed
• Unpushed commits pushed successfully! — working tree clean, but local was ahead
• No changes to push — already up to date. — nothing new
• Push rejected — see Troubleshooting below

pull

Pull from GitHub. Auto-runs link afterward unless --skip-link is passed.

sm pull --repo owner/name  # first time — specify repo
sm pull                    # subsequent runs — uses existing remote
sm pull --skip-link        # pull only, don't re-link

First-time behavior:

• If no --repo and no existing origin remote, prompts for owner/name
• If ~/.agents/ doesn't exist yet, clones into it

Possible outcomes:

• Skills cloned successfully! — fresh clone on new machine, auto-runs link
• Skills updated from remote. — pulled new changes, auto-runs link
• Already up to date. — no new changes, skips link
• Rebase conflict — see Troubleshooting below

link (global mode)

Read .skill-lock.json, create relative symlinks from each agent's global skills directory to ~/.agents/skills/.

sm link                              # interactive prompt
sm link --agents cursor opencode     # non-interactive, skip prompt

Interactive behavior:

The agent selector has two sections:

1. Locked section — 10 universal agents (amp, cline, codex, cursor, gemini-cli, github-copilot, kimi-cli, opencode, replit, universal) are always included because they share ~/.agents/skills/ as their path.
2. Searchable list — 31 non-universal agents. Type to search/filter.

Pre-selection priority: saved config > .skill-lock.json > agents already existing on disk.

When --agents is provided, the interactive prompt is skipped entirely. Use this for scripting and AI agent automation:

sm link --agents cursor opencode claude-code

link --project

Link or copy skills to the current working directory.

sm link --project                                                       # interactive
sm link --project --agents cursor claude-code --skills my-skill         # non-interactive (copy is default)
sm link --project --agents cursor claude-code --skills my-skill --mode symlink  # explicit symlink

Interactive flow (3 steps):

1. Select skills (--skills to skip) — choose which skills to include
2. Select copy/symlink — in practice this prompt is skipped because --mode defaults to copy in the CLI. Only appears if linkCommand is called programmatically without defaults
3. Select agents (--agents to skip) — same searchable multiselect with locked universal section

Copy vs symlink:

• copy (default, recommended) — creates independent files in project. Overwrites existing skill dirs
• symlink — creates absolute symlinks pointing to ~/.agents/skills/. Existing non-symlink dirs are skipped

Agents that share the same projectPath (e.g., trae and trae-cn both use .trae/skills) are deduplicated — one operation per unique path.

For AI agents: the fully non-interactive version is almost always what you want:

sm link --project --agents cursor opencode claude-code --skills my-skill --mode copy

Common Workflows

First-time setup on a new machine

npm install -g @tc9011/skills-manager
sm pull --repo owner/my-skills   # clone + auto-link

Daily sync

sm pull    # fetch latest + re-link
sm push    # backup local changes

Project-level skills

cd /path/to/project
sm link --project --skills my-skill --agents cursor opencode claude-code

Re-link after installing new skills

npx skills add some-repo       # install via vercel-labs/skills
sm link                         # re-link to all agents
sm push                         # backup the new skill

Troubleshooting

Push rejected (remote ahead)

Error: Push rejected — remote contains commits that you do not have locally.

Fix:

sm pull      # pulls and rebases
sm push      # retry

Or manually:

cd ~/.agents
git pull --rebase origin main
sm push

Rebase conflict on pull

Error: Rebase conflict detected. Your local skills have diverged from the remote.

The CLI auto-aborts the failed rebase. To resolve:

cd ~/.agents
git fetch origin
git rebase origin/main     # resolve conflicts manually
# OR if you want to discard local changes:
git reset --hard origin/main

No skills found

Error: No skills found in ~/.agents/skills.

This means ~/.agents/skills/ is empty or doesn't exist. Either:

• Run sm pull --repo owner/name to restore from backup
• Install skills via npx skills add <repo>

Unknown agent IDs

Error: Unknown agent ID(s): foo. Run with no --agents to see available IDs.

The --agents flag only accepts valid agent IDs from the 46-agent registry. Run sm link without --agents to see the interactive list.

Auth failure during push/pull

Symptom: Git errors like Authentication failed, Permission denied, or Repository not found.

This means git has no credentials and no token was found. See the "Fixing Auth Failures" section above.

~/.agents/ is not a git repo

On first push or pull, the CLI auto-initializes git. If this somehow fails:

cd ~/.agents
git init
git remote add origin https://github.com/owner/my-skills.git
sm push

Supported Agents (41)

• 10 universal (always locked in interactive prompts): amp, cline, codex, cursor, gemini-cli, github-copilot, kimi-cli, opencode, replit, universal
• 31 non-universal (appear in searchable list): claude-code, windsurf, trae, roo, augment, continue, goose, kilo, kode, and more

Constraints

• .skill-lock.json is READ ONLY — never create, modify, or delete it
• ~/.agents/ is the git repo root (not ~/.agents/skills/)
• Global link = relative symlinks; project link = absolute symlinks or copies
• Auth tokens are transient in-memory only — never persisted to .git/config
• This tool does NOT install skills from the registry — use npx skills add for that