08 · Skills Overview
A skill is a self-contained, portable unit of capability: a SKILL.md manifest with YAML frontmatter, optionally accompanied by scripts/, references/, and assets/. The prometheus-skill-pack ships 35 top-level skills across 13 categories — 95+ skills counting sub-skills — and every one of them is documented in the three pages that follow this one. This page explains the model: how skills are structured, how they are discovered, the standard they conform to, and where to find each category.
The skills model
Every skill follows the same shape, which is what makes them portable across ten AI tools.
skills/<category>/<skill-name>/
├── SKILL.md ← manifest: YAML frontmatter + instructions (under 500 lines)
├── scripts/ ← executable code (optional)
├── references/ ← detailed docs, loaded on demand (optional)
├── assets/ ← templates, schemas, examples (optional)
└── templates/ ← Tera (.tera) code-generation templates (forge-rs skills)
The frontmatter is the contract. A name (lowercase, hyphens, matching the directory) and a description (1–1024 characters, searchable) are required. For new skills, strict validation also requires license, version, and a non-empty metadata.tags array.
---
name: axum-patterns
description: Production Axum web API patterns — routing, middleware, state, extractors
license: MIT
metadata:
author: Prometheus AGS
version: '1.0.0'
category: rust
tags: [rust, axum, web, api, middleware]
---
Two design principles govern every skill. Progressive disclosure: the main SKILL.md stays under 500 lines, and detail lives in references/ that is loaded only when needed — this keeps context lean. Third-person, imperative voice: "Run the command," not "you should run." These are not style preferences; they are what keeps a large skill library usable inside a finite context window.
How skills are discovered and triggered
Skills surface differently depending on the AI tool, but the mechanism is consistent: a skill's description and metadata.tags are what the tool matches against the user's intent.
In Claude Code, the flat installer turns each skill into a slash command (/kbd-init, /evolve, /refine-ui, and so on) and the description drives auto-triggering. The native agent generator's own skills engine uses TF-IDF selection over the configured skill directories to pick the most relevant skill for a task — the same lightweight, explainable matching the Karpathy KB uses, applied to skill selection. Discovery per tool is covered on the Platform Support page.
The AgentSkills.io standard
Every native skill conforms strictly to the AgentSkills.io specification. That conformance is what makes a skill portable to any platform that reads the standard — not just Claude Code, but Kimi, MiniMax, OpenCode, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, Roo Code, and Amp. The repository's validator (scripts/validate-skills.js) enforces the spec: frontmatter schema, the name pattern ^[a-z0-9]+(-[a-z0-9]+)*$, name/directory consistency, forward-slash paths only, script executability, and — in strict mode — the presence of license, version, and metadata.tags. The validation gates are documented on the Contributing page.
The full category index
Counts below are hand-maintained and have drifted before (Process was listed as 9 when it was 15). The authoritative, generated breakdown is the Skills Index in
SKILLS.md— regenerate it withnpm run generate:skills-index, and verify withnpm run check:skills-index. The site's own catalog is generated at build time.
| Category | Count | Skills | Documented in |
|---|---|---|---|
| Process | 15 | adversarial-review, cowork-management, ideation-mindmap, iterative-evolver, kbd-evolve, kbd-goal, kbd-goal-check, kbd-process-orchestrator, liter-llm-bridge, native-agent, pmpo-elicit, pmpo-evolver, pmpo-outer-loop, pmpo-skill-creator, zeespec-interrogator | 09 · Process Skills |
| Rust | 10 | actor-model, async-patterns, axum-patterns, error-handling, karpathy-tokenizer, librefang-wasm-skill, mcp-server, performance, prometheus-rust-auditor, workspace-structure | 10 · Language & Domain Skills |
| React | 2 | react-vite-stack, prometheus-entity-skills (8 sub-skills) | 10 |
| Flutter | 1 | flutter-rust-ffi | 10 |
| Tauri | 1 | tauri-react-vite | 10 |
| HTMX | 1 | htmx-alpine-lit | 10 |
| TypeScript | 1 | typescript-base-patterns | 10 |
| Go | 1 | go-base-patterns | 10 |
| Python | 1 | pyo3-bridge | 10 |
| Architecture | 1 | clean-architecture | 10 |
| Testing | 5 | bdd-cucumber-js, bdd-cucumber-rs, bdd-lifecycle-loop, bdd-testing, bdd-video-proof | 10 |
| DevOps | 5 | argocd-multicloud, disk-space-guardian, gitops-bootstrap, gitops-transform, kustomize-overlay | 10 |
| Document extraction | 1 | kreuzberg | 10 |
| Learn | 15 | feynman-loop, learn-about-system, learn-certify, learn-goal, learn-grade, learn-harness, learn-kb, learn-plan, learn-practice, learn-retain, learn-survey, sync-peers, sync-push, sync-status, ui-surface | Learn overview |
| Research | 1 | deep-research (10 sub-skills) | 10 |
| Documentation | 1 | llm-wiki | 10 |
| Flint | 6 | flint-sdk-csharp, -dart, -go, -kotlin, -swift, -ts | 10 |
| Imported (submodules) | 2 | artifact-refiner, sycophancy-correction | 11, 07 |
Native, imported, and forge-rs skills
There are three kinds of skill in the repository, and the distinction matters for how you maintain them.
Native skills live directly under skills/<category>/ and are maintained in this repository. Most are uniform v1.0.0, MIT-licensed, with metadata.tags. (One exception worth knowing: kreuzberg is Elastic-2.0 licensed, not MIT.)
Imported skills live under skills/imported/ as git submodules, because they have independent development lifecycles. The two current imports are artifact-refiner and sycophancy-correction. You never edit an imported skill in place — you update its submodule pointer. (See Contributing.)
forge-rs skills carry .tera templates under templates/. forge-rs scans skills/<language>/<skill-name>/templates/*.tera, and each skill's skill.toml declares which templates it ships. The four template variables (task_description, task_id, constitution_summary, karpathy_focus) are filled at enrichment time. This is how a skill contributes not just guidance but actual code scaffolding — covered on the Rust Toolchain page.
The pack also generates new skills on demand. pmpo-skill-creator produces production-ready skills via the PMPO loop in four modes (create, clone, extend, update), and the meta-template system in forge-rs scaffolds new skills and templates from the command line. Both are documented in the pages ahead.
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