locus-skills — Claude Code plugin

Reaches the user's locus graph from a session: a request goes in, the few sections that answer it come back.

.claude-plugin/marketplace.json    at the REPO ROOT — a marketplace manifest
                                   must sit there, not inside the plugin
packages/claude-plugin/
  .claude-plugin/plugin.json       the manifest Claude Code reads
  skills/locus/SKILL.md            when to reach for the graph, and how
  commands/                        /compile /skills /install /publish
  hooks/session-start.sh           reports whether the CLI is usable, and what the graph holds

Installing

The catalog is hosted, so nothing here needs to be cloned:

/plugin marketplace add https://skills.locusgraph.com/marketplace.json
/plugin install locus-skills@locus-skills

That entry installs @locusgraph/claude-locus-skills-plugin from npm. A marketplace is not optional — every Claude Code install path resolves a plugin through one — but it does not have to be a repository you can clone, which is why this one is served over HTTPS and sources the plugin from the registry.

To script it, or to install without the interactive panel:

claude plugin marketplace add https://skills.locusgraph.com/marketplace.json
claude plugin install locus-skills@locus-skills

The plugin drives the locus CLI, so that has to be present and signed in:

npm i -g @locusgraph/locus-skills-cli
locus login

npx @locusgraph/locus-skills-cli login works too if you would rather not install it globally, but the plugin calls a bare locus, so a global install is what makes the slash commands work.

Developing this plugin

The repo is its own marketplace, sourcing the plugin from the working tree rather than the registry:

/plugin marketplace add ./

What it ships

One skill. skills/locus/SKILL.md teaches Claude when a task is likely to match something the user has written down, and to pass their request through verbatim — retrieval matches on the words they used, and rewriting the request is the most common reason a lookup misses.

Four commands. /compile <request> fetches a skill for one turn. /skills lists what the graph holds. /install <request> pins a compiled skill into .claude/skills. /publish greps for leftover TODOs, lints and seeds the skills under library/.

The skill also carries what the CLI's usage text does not: the eight archetypes, the rules a publish is refused or degraded on (a knowledge or generative skill's sibling file, scaffold placeholders left in place, trigger length), and the write-back operators — learn add, append and update — with suggest and forget for the two ends of a skill's life.

One hook, deliberately read-only, and quick. SessionStart reports whether the CLI is installed and signed in, then prints every skill in the graph with the phrases that fetch it, so a skill published today fires tomorrow without anyone running a command. It prints from a cache the CLI keeps beside its credentials (~/.config/locus/skills-cache.json) and refreshes that in the background, so the session starts in well under a tenth of a second instead of waiting a few seconds on the graph; the heading says how old the list is. locus publish rewrites the cache on success, so a skill published mid-session is listed at the very next start. Under 50 skills every phrase prints; from 50 up each skill shows its first three, because the phrases are what make a skill fire and the count per skill is what gives, never the phrases altogether. The full list is always one command away: locus skills --brief, the hook's last line. It writes nothing under .claude. .claude/skills/<slug>/SKILL.md is where locus compile --install pins a compiled skill, and a hook that wrote there on every session would silently revert the user's pin — so this one only reports.

Why the plugin ships no skills of its own

A plugin is static content installed from a git repo; a locus graph is per-user. Bundling this repo's own skills would hand every installer our library rather than connecting them to theirs, and would lose on-demand compilation entirely — twelve sections where three were asked for. So the plugin ships the bridge, and the skills stay in the graph.