Review A Skill

Goal

Evaluate a single skill's quality, relevance, and safety before it enters or stays in a library.

Guardrails

• Always use --format json for machine-readable output in automated pipelines.
• Always use --fields to limit output size when inspecting catalog entries.
• Always use --dry-run before curating or removing a skill.
• Never remove a skill without first checking if other skills depend on it via info --format json dependencies.

Workflow

1. Preview the skill content to check for quality and safety.

npx ai-agent-skills preview <skill-name>

The preview command sanitizes content — if it flags sanitization, investigate before proceeding.

2. Inspect the catalog entry for metadata completeness.

npx ai-agent-skills info <skill-name> --format json --fields name,description,tags,collections,dependencies

3. Validate the skill's SKILL.md structure.

npx ai-agent-skills validate <skill-name>

4. If the skill needs curation (notes, collections, verification):

npx ai-agent-skills curate <skill-name> --notes "Reviewed: solid patterns" --verify --dry-run
npx ai-agent-skills curate <skill-name> --notes "Reviewed: solid patterns" --verify

5. If the skill should be removed:

npx ai-agent-skills curate <skill-name> --remove --dry-run
npx ai-agent-skills curate <skill-name> --remove --yes

Decision Criteria

• Keep: Clear description, valid frontmatter, useful to the library's audience, no injection patterns.
• Curate: Needs better whyHere, collection placement, or verification status.
• Remove: Duplicate, outdated, broken source, or contains suspicious content.

Gotchas

• The preview command only works for vendored (house) skills. Upstream skills show description and whyHere only.
• The validate command checks frontmatter structure but not content quality — that requires human or agent judgment.
• Removing a skill that other skills depend on will break the dependency graph. Always check dependencies.usedBy first.