skill-research - SKILL.md Agent Skill

name: skill-research description: Use when researching a technology or external skill to create, update, or improve reusable agent skills from verified sources.

Skill Research

Routing

Use to research verified sources before creating or updating reusable skills. Use project-skill-audit for catalog-level merge/remove/rename decisions and writing-skills for skill authoring mechanics.

Research a technology or external skill, extract verified patterns, and create or improve a reusable skill.

For auditing an existing external skill, use references/external-skill-audit.md.

Input

Use the topic, URL, local file path, or external skill named by the user. If the topic is ambiguous, ask to clarify before searching.

Process

1. Discover Sources

Search for:

<topic> official documentation
<topic> getting started guide
<topic> API reference
<topic> GitHub repository

Source priority:

Official docs (docs.*, *.dev, *.io)
Official GitHub repos (README, /docs)
Official blogs/announcements

Select 3-5 high-quality URLs. If nothing credible is found, ask the user for a URL.

2. Extract Content

From each source, extract only:

Installation / setup
Core concepts and mental model
Key API / functions / types
Common patterns and examples
Version info and constraints

Skip: navigation, ads, comments, unrelated sidebars.

3. Generate Skill

Create a SKILL.md with:

---
name: <topic-kebab-case>
description: <one-line description of when to use this skill>
---

# <Topic>

## When to Use
[Clear trigger conditions]

## Core Concepts
[Mental model — how this technology thinks]

## Key API
[Most important functions/types with signatures and brief descriptions]

## Common Patterns
[2-3 code examples showing typical usage]

## Gotchas
[Things that trip people up]

## References
[Source URLs with scrape date]

4. Save

Save to the runtime's installed skills directory as <topic>/SKILL.md.

Warn before overwriting an existing skill.

5. Confirm

Report what was created:

Skill name
Sources used (count and quality)
Save location
When it will trigger

Rules

Never hallucinate documentation — only use content from fetched sources
Never invent APIs that weren't found in docs
If discovery fails, ask the user for a URL rather than guessing
Keep SKILL.md under 300 lines — link to references/ for detail
Record source URLs and scrape date for staleness tracking