AI Skills Registry

A centralized registry and CLI for managing AI coding assistant skills. Keep prompts, context definitions, and strategy documents organized across agents, languages, themes, and services — installable in one command.

Supported agents: Google Antigravity · Claude Code · Cursor · Visual Studio Code (Copilot)

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Features

• Multi-agent — skills for Antigravity, Claude Code, Cursor, and VSCode Copilot
• Rich metadata — each skill has a description, category, tags, and version
• Categories — logical groups: engineering, architecture, security, data, etc.
• Tags — find skills by framework or service (e.g. jest, owasp, pandas)
• Native install — install directly to each agent's config location (.claude/skills/, .cursor/skills/, etc.)
• Lockfile — pin team skills in .ai-skills.json and restore with one command
• Dynamic fetching — no local clone needed; fetches from GitHub at runtime

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Contributing

We welcome contributions from the community! Whether you want to add a new skill, fix a bug, or improve documentation, please check out our Contributing Guide for detailed instructions on how to get started.

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Quickstart

Global Installation (Recommended)

Install the CLI globally directly from GitHub to use it across all your projects:

npm install -g https://github.com/ucdavis/ai-skills-registry/tarball/main

Note

Reinstalling or updating: Always remove the old version first to avoid ENOTDIR errors:

npm rm -g ai-skills-registry

Local Project Installation

You can also add it as a dev dependency to a specific project's package.json:

npm install -D ucdavis/ai-skills-registry

Then run it via npx:

npx ai-skills list

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Commands

list — browse available skills

ai-skills list

# Filter by any dimension
ai-skills list --lang typescript
ai-skills list --category security
ai-skills list --concept testing
ai-skills list --tag owasp

# List all available groupings
ai-skills list --categories
ai-skills list --concepts

search — find skills by keyword

Searches across id, description, tags, concept, and agent name.

ai-skills search testing
ai-skills search "code review"
ai-skills search aws

info — inspect a skill before installing

ai-skills info testing --lang typescript
ai-skills info code-review --lang general

install — install a specific skill into your project's .ai-skills directory:

ai-skills install testing --lang typescript
ai-skills install security

Standard installs use .ai-skills/<concept>-<language>/.

To install directly into an agent's specific native config location, provide the --agent argument:

# Installs to .cursor/skills/testing-typescript/
ai-skills install testing --agent cursor

# Installs to .claude/skills/code-review-general/
ai-skills install code-review --agent claude-code

# Installs to .agent/skills/git-workflow-general/
ai-skills install git-workflow --agent antigravity

install-all — restore from lockfile

# Create a lockfile
ai-skills init

.ai-skills.json example:

{
  "skills": [
    { "id": "testing-typescript" },
    { "id": "security-general" },
    { "id": "git-workflow-general", "agent": "claude-code" }
  ]
}

Then run install-all to download and apply them all at once. Skills with an agent specified will be installed natively for that agent. Skills without an agent will be installed in the default .ai-skills structure.

ai-skills install-all

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Agent Native Install Locations

Agent	Strategy	Location
antigravity	Skill folder	.agent/skills/<concept>-<language>/
claude-code	Skill folder	.claude/skills/<concept>-<language>/
cursor	Skill folder	.cursor/skills/<concept>-<language>/
vsc	Skill folder	.github/skills/<concept>-<language>/

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Skill Schema

Each skill in skills.json:

{
  "id": "testing-typescript",
  "concept": "testing",
  "language": "typescript",
  "category": "engineering",
  "tags": ["vitest", "jest", "tdd", "mocking", "coverage"],
  "description": "TypeScript testing with Vitest/Jest: file structure, mocking strategy, async patterns, and coverage targets",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "files": ["SKILL.md"]
}

Categories: engineering · architecture · security · data · frontend · backend · devops · project-management · documentation · auditing

Skill files use YAML frontmatter matching the manifest entry, followed by the actual instructions in Markdown.

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Available Skills

ID	Category	Tags
testing-general	engineering	unit-testing, boundaries, null-safety, tdd
testing-typescript	engineering	vitest, jest, tdd, mocking, coverage
testing-python	engineering	pytest, unittest, mocking, fixtures, tdd
testing-java	engineering	junit, mockito, tdd, integration-testing
code-review-general	engineering	review, best-practices, security, readability, performance
code-review-python	engineering	code-review, python, fastapi, pydantic, async
code-review-typescript	engineering	code-review, typescript, async, type-safety, node
refactoring-typescript	engineering	typescript, clean-code, dry, solid, type-safety
git-workflow-general	engineering	git, commits, branching, pr, conventional-commits
security-general	security	owasp, injection, xss, secrets, auth, input-validation
architecture-general	architecture	design-patterns, microservices, clean-architecture, ddd, solid
architecture-python	architecture	pep8, design-patterns, separation-of-concerns, clean-architecture, mypy
data-science-python	data	pandas, numpy, jupyter, sklearn, reproducibility, data-validation
accessibility-react-native	engineering	a11y, react-native, expo, ios, android
skill-authoring-general	engineering	authoring, agent, skills, scaffolding, specification
package-management-python	engineering	uv, pip, venv, pyproject, dependencies, lockfile
accessibility-general	auditing	accessibility, testing, wcag, ui, design
design-frontend	frontend	design, styling, ui, ux, aesthetics
ci-cd-github-actions	devops	ci-cd, github-actions, devops, workflow, automation
project-management-jira	project-management	project-management, jira, agile, user-stories
git-workflow-pr-generator	engineering	git, pr, pull-request, automation
documentation-project	documentation	documentation, docs, project, architecture, overview
documentation-readme	documentation	documentation, readme, generative
infrastructure-terraform	devops	infrastructure, terraform, iac, aws, azure, gcp
assistant-rocky-lti-assist	engineering	assistant, coding, fastapi, react, mcp
assistant-ucd-mobile	engineering	assistant, coding, expo, react-native, typescript, nativewind
git-workflow-monorepo	engineering	git, monorepo, branching, versioning, semver, commits, pr, merge-conflicts
git-workflow-release	engineering	git, release, versioning, changelog, semver

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Configuration

Environment Variable	Default	Description
AI_SKILLS_REGISTRY_URL	GitHub skills.json	Custom manifest location
AI_SKILLS_REPO_URL	GitHub raw root	Custom repo base URL
AI_SKILLS_AGENTS_URL	GitHub agents.json	Custom agents config location