Agent Skills

Every tool ships one or more Agent Skills under skills/<name>/, packaged into every release so agents can drive the tool. Authoring conventions are documented in the repo-level SKILL_DEVELOPMENT_PROCESS.md; this page covers how skills are validated and shipped by the build.

Layout

skills/<name>/
  SKILL.md          # frontmatter: name, description, version (+ license)
  references/       # cli-cheatsheet.md, docs-index.md, error-recipes.md
  examples/         # runnable examples, each with run.sh

A repo declares which skills to ship in scripts/skill-manifest.yaml:

skills:
  - name: verilator
    path: skills/verilator
    binaries: [verilator, verilator_coverage, verilator_gantt]

Validation & staging

During the build, stage-skills.py (in edapack-common):

1. validates each SKILL.md frontmatter (name, description, version) and that the frontmatter name matches the manifest;

2. verifies every declared binary exists in the release bin/;

3. copies the skill tree into <release>/skills/<name>/;

4. writes <release>/skills/index.json (schema edapack.skills/1).

Enforced shipping

The build runs staging in strict mode via ec_finalize_release, and then hard-requires skills/index.json, export.envrc, and manifest.json to be present before packaging. A missing skill, a missing binary, or a missing export.envrc fails the build — shipping skills and the envrc is an invariant, not an optional step.