@tylerho/pi-skills-banner-split

Splits the startup banner's Skills section into model-invokable and user-invoked groups.

Install

pi install npm:@tylerho/pi-skills-banner-split

Prototype: This package patches pi internals and may break with pi version updates. Pin your pi version and expect to update it when pi changes.

Skills Banner Split

Splits the startup banner's [Skills] section into two sections — [Skills: Model-Invokable] and [Skills: User-Invoked] — so the loaded-resources listing distinguishes skills the model can auto-load from skills gated behind explicit /skill:name invocation (disable-model-invocation: true in frontmatter).

Key concepts

• Runtime mutation of the live component tree, no dist patching. pi core renders the banner in interactive-mode.js's showLoadedResources() with no extension hook, and ExpandableText is a module-local class (not re-exported, so the prototype-patch approach from collapsed-previews is unavailable). Instead the extension walks tui.children (the TUI root is a Container whose direct children include documentContainer → loadedResourcesContainer), finds the section whose getCollapsedText() starts with [Skills], and rewrites its getCollapsedText/getExpandedText getters in place, then calls setExpanded(wasExpanded) to re-render. Ctrl+O toggles keep working because pi's toggle broadcast calls setExpanded on the same instance, which re-invokes the new getters.
• TUI capture via throwaway widget factory. Extensions get no direct handle to the TUI instance, but ctx.ui.setWidget(key, factory) invokes the factory synchronously with the stable TUI proxy (createInteractiveTuiReference, which survives renderer swaps). The extension registers a zero-line widget, captures the tui argument, and immediately removes the widget.
• Split source of truth is the system prompt, not the filesystem. The model-invokable set is parsed from the <available_skills> <name> entries in ctx.getSystemPrompt() (which is exactly what the model sees); banner names absent from it are user-invoked. No SKILL.md scanning, no skill-path discovery.
• Deferred application with retry. session_start fires before showLoadedResources() populates the banner (both on startup and on /reload, which emits session_start with reason "reload"), and showLoadedResources() clears and recreates the container — so the split is applied from a setTimeout(0) with up to 20 retries at 100ms until the [Skills] section exists. Quiet-startup sessions skip the banner; retries exhaust silently.
• No-op guards. If the banner is already split (text contains "Model-Invokable"), or either group would be empty, the banner is left untouched.
• Expanded view is re-bucketed by name-in-path. The original expanded body is scope-grouped skill paths; each line is assigned to the group whose skill name appears as a /<name>/ path segment. Scope and package header lines match no name and are dropped, so the expanded view loses scope grouping in exchange for the split.

API

No tools, commands, events beyond one session_start handler, shortcuts, or config. TUI mode only (ctx.mode !== "tui" bails).

Exports

• Default export: function (pi: ExtensionAPI) — the standard extension entry point; only public surface.

Examples

• Startup banner shows [Skills: Model-Invokable] (skills in the system prompt's <available_skills>) and [Skills: User-Invoked] (the rest, e.g. disable-model-invocation: true skills) instead of one merged [Skills] list.
• After editing this extension — run /reload; the banner is recreated by pi and the split re-applies via the reload session_start.