Update Installed Skills

Goal

Keep installed skills current without breaking the agent's workflow or silently overwriting local customizations.

Guardrails

• Always use --dry-run before running a real update.
• Check what is currently installed before updating: npx ai-agent-skills list --installed.
• Never update all skills at once in production without reviewing the dry-run output.
• Use --format json to capture structured update results for logging.

Workflow

1. List currently installed skills.

npx ai-agent-skills list --installed --format json --fields name

2. Check for available updates.

npx ai-agent-skills check

3. Dry-run the update.

npx ai-agent-skills sync <skill-name> --dry-run

4. Apply the update after reviewing.

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

5. For bulk updates, review each skill's dry-run output.

npx ai-agent-skills sync --all --dry-run

Gotchas

• Skills installed from GitHub will attempt a fresh clone during sync. If the upstream repo is gone, the update will fail gracefully.
• Manually edited SKILL.md files will be overwritten by sync. Back up customizations before syncing.
• The check command makes network requests to verify upstream sources. It may be slow or fail if sources are unreachable.