| name | browse-and-evaluate |
| description | Use when exploring the ai-agent-skills catalog to find, compare, and evaluate skills before installing. Always use --fields to limit output size and --dry-run before committing to an install. |
| category | workflow |
| version | 4.1.0 |
Browse And Evaluate
Goal
Find the right skill for a task without flooding the context window or installing blindly.
Guardrails
- Always use
--fields on list/search/info to keep output small. Default: --fields name,tier,workArea,description.
- Always use
--dry-run before installing anything.
- Never install more than 3 skills at once without explicit user confirmation.
- Prefer
--format json in non-interactive pipelines. The CLI defaults to JSON when stdout is not a TTY.
- Use
--limit when browsing large catalogs. Start with --limit 10.
Workflow
- Search or browse the catalog.
npx ai-agent-skills search <query> --fields name,tier,workArea,description --limit 10
- Get details on a candidate.
npx ai-agent-skills info <skill-name> --fields name,description,tags,collections,installCommands
- Preview the skill content.
npx ai-agent-skills preview <skill-name>
- Dry-run the install.
npx ai-agent-skills install <skill-name> --dry-run
- Install only after reviewing the dry-run output.
npx ai-agent-skills install <skill-name>
Gotchas
- The
preview command sanitizes skill content to strip prompt injection patterns. If content looks truncated, check if suspicious patterns were removed.
- Collection installs pull multiple skills. Always
--list or --dry-run a collection before installing.
- Upstream (non-vendored) skills require a network fetch at install time. Use
--dry-run to verify the source is reachable.
