Jerry's Agent Skills

A catalog of agent skills for making AI systems more reliable, disciplined, and useful in real work.

Quick Install

# Interactive picker — choose agent and skills
npx jerry-skills install

# Install all skills to a specific agent
npx jerry-skills install --agent copilot
npx jerry-skills install --agent codex
npx jerry-skills install --agent hermes
npx jerry-skills install --agent claude
npx jerry-skills install --agent antigravity

# List available skills without installing
npx jerry-skills list

See docs/installation.md for full details including all agents, custom destinations, and VS Code Copilot setup.

Supported Agents

| Agent | Install location | Format | |-------|-----------------|--------| | OpenAI Codex | ~/.agents/skills/ | topic/name/SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter | | VS Code Copilot | ~/.copilot/skills/ | name/SKILL.md (flat), name must be lowercase-hyphen matching directory | | Hermes | ~/.hermes/skills/ | topic/name/SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter | | Claude Code | ~/.claude/skills/ | topic/name/SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter | | Antigravity | ~/.antigravity/skills/ | topic/name/SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter |

The installer automatically adapts the format for each agent:

• Copilot uses a flat structure (no topic subdirectories) and slug-normalizes the name field to match the directory
• All other agents use topic-based subdirectories preserving the original name field

Documentation

| Document | What's in it | |----------|-------------| | Find by Use Case | "I need a skill for..." — tables matching situations to the best skill | | Skill Catalog | Detailed per-skill entries: what it is, when to use it, best for | | Recommended Combinations | Skill stacks for common scenarios (debugging, architecture, refactoring...) | | Quick Reference | Compact tables of all protocol and framework skills | | Benchmarks | A/B evaluation results — empirical proof which skills work | | Installation Guide | Detailed install instructions for each agent |

Two Kinds of Skills

This repository contains two kinds of skills:

1. Operational protocols — skills that act like procedures or control systems. These benefit from a state-machine structure because the value is in gating behavior, forcing evidence collection, and preventing premature action.

2. Conceptual frameworks — skills that act like lenses, heuristics, routing models, or architectural principles. These do not always need to be state machines. In many cases, forcing them into a rigid protocol makes them worse: more ceremonial, less adaptable, and less readable.

When to use which

Use a state-machine/protocol when the agent should:

• follow a repeatable sequence
• respect tool-gating by phase
• create mandatory diagnostic artifacts
• stop when a condition is met
• avoid looping, over-searching, or reckless execution

Use a framework when the agent should:

• adopt a way of seeing a problem
• reason about tradeoffs
• borrow principles from a book or framework
• improve judgment rather than enforce a workflow
• adapt ideas fluidly to many contexts

The strongest setups use both: protocols for execution discipline, frameworks for better judgment.

Skill Categories

| Category | What it covers | |----------|---------------| | 🔧 Execution | Problem-solving protocols (debugging, refactoring, improvement) | | 🧭 Judgment & Routing | Decision-making frameworks (routing, triage, risk analysis) | | 🎛️ Orchestration | Workflow control (multi-agent, coordination, memory) | | ✨ Output Quality | Self-improvement (revision, verification, clarity) | | 🏗️ Systems & Architecture | Design principles (data, teams, reliability) | | 🛠️ Development | Skill building and development workflows | | 🐛 Debugging | Root-cause analysis and log correlation | | 🧠 Reasoning | Faithfulness verification, anti-hallucination, token-efficient reasoning, and reasoning quality | | 🤖 MLOps | Local LLM tooling and model management |

Philosophy

This repo should not force one format onto every idea.

The goal is not to make everything look uniform. The goal is to make each skill more executable and more useful.

Some skills become dramatically better when turned into state machines. Others become worse.

A good agent-skill repository should preserve both:

• control where behavior must be constrained
• judgment where thinking quality matters more than workflow ceremony