Agent Skills

Quickstart

Install a free skill and watch it change how your agent works — in about five minutes.

The fastest way to understand Agent Skills is to install one and use it. This takes about five minutes and costs nothing.

1. Install the free set

npx skills add xentropyai/skills

This installs three free, MIT-licensed skills:

  • skill-author — write a spec-valid SKILL.md, and it bundles a dependency-free validate.py you can point at any skill.
  • commit-hygiene — turns a messy working tree into a clean, one-concern-per-commit history with messages that explain why.
  • repro-first-debugging — makes the agent reproduce a failure before touching code, then prove the fix against the same repro.

2. Trigger one

Ask your agent to do something the skill covers. For repro-first-debugging, hand it a bug report and watch it insist on reproducing the failure first, instead of guessing at a fix. For commit-hygiene, ask it to commit a messy working tree and see it split the changes by concern.

3. Confirm it activated

Ask the agent which skills it used, or check that its behavior changed — a commit-hygiene run produces Conventional Commits with why in the body, not a single "update files" commit.

It didn't load?

The most common reason a skill silently does nothing is a structural validation failure in its SKILL.md. Ours pass — run the checker on any skill with validate.py.

Where to go next