Setup Skills

Setup Skills

Scaffold the per-repo configuration the engineering skills read:

• Issue tracker — where issues live (local markdown, GitHub, GitLab, or a workflow you describe)
• Triage labels — the strings used for the five canonical triage roles
• Domain docs — where CONTEXT.md and ADRs live, and the consumer rules for reading them

This is opt-in, not a prerequisite. Every skill that reads a tracker defaults to the local markdown tracker — .scratch/<feature-slug>/spec.md and .scratch/<feature-slug>/issues/NN-<slug>.md — when no configuration exists. Run this skill when you want to point them somewhere else, or to change a target already configured. A repo that never runs it still works.

This is a prompt-driven skill, not a deterministic script. Explore, present what you found, confirm with the user, then write.

Process

1. Explore

Look at the current repo to understand its starting state. Read whatever exists; don't assume:

• git remote -v and .git/config — is this a GitHub repo? Which one?
• AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md at the repo root — does either exist? Is there already an ## Agent skills section in either?
• CONTEXT.md and CONTEXT-MAP.md at the repo root
• docs/adr/ and any src/*/docs/adr/ directories
• docs/agents/ — does this skill's prior output already exist?
• .scratch/ — sign that the local-markdown tracker is already in use
• Is the triage skill installed? (a triage skill folder alongside this one, or triage in your available skills.) This decides whether Section B runs at all.
• Monorepo signals — a pnpm-workspace.yaml, a workspaces field in package.json, or a populated packages/* with its own src/. Present only in a genuinely large multi-package repo; their absence means single-context, which is almost every repo.

2. Present findings and ask

Summarise what's present and what's missing. Then take the sections in order — one section, one answer, then the next.

Lead each section with the recommended answer so the user can accept it in a word. Give a one-line explainer only when the choice genuinely branches; skip the section entirely when exploration already settled it (Section B when triage isn't installed, Section C when there's no monorepo).

Section A — Issue tracker.

Explainer: The "issue tracker" is where issues live for this repo. Skills like to-tickets, triage, to-spec, wayfinder, and code-review read from and write to it — they need to know whether to call gh issue create, write a markdown file under .scratch/, or follow some other workflow you describe. Pick the place you actually track work for this repo.

Default posture: local markdown, which is what the skills assume when unconfigured — propose it unless the repo says otherwise. If a git remote points at GitHub, propose GitHub instead; if a remote points at GitLab (gitlab.com or a self-hosted host), propose GitLab. The full set:

• Local markdown — issues live as files under .scratch/<feature>/ in this repo (good for solo projects or repos without a remote)
• GitHub — issues live in the repo's GitHub Issues (uses the gh CLI)
• GitLab — issues live in the repo's GitLab Issues (uses the glab CLI)
• Other (Jira, Linear, etc.) — ask the user to describe the workflow in one paragraph; the skill will record it as freeform prose

Record the choice in docs/agents/issue-tracker.md. The GitHub and GitLab templates carry a "PRs as a request surface" flag, defaulted off — leave it off and don't raise it; a user who wants external PRs in the triage queue can flip the flag in the file later.

Section B — Triage label vocabulary. Skip this section entirely if the triage skill isn't installed (exploration told you) — an uninstalled skill needs no labels.

If it is installed, ask exactly one question:

Do you want to keep the default triage labels? (recommended: yes)

The defaults are the five canonical roles, each label string equal to its name: needs-triage, needs-info, ready-for-agent, ready-for-human, wontfix. On yes, write them as-is. Only if the user says no — usually because their tracker already uses other names (e.g. bug:triage for needs-triage) — collect the overrides so triage applies existing labels instead of creating duplicates.

Section C — Domain docs. Default to single-context — one CONTEXT.md + docs/adr/ at the repo root. This fits almost every repo; write it without asking.

Offer multi-context — a root CONTEXT-MAP.md pointing to per-context CONTEXT.md files — only when exploration found monorepo signals. Then confirm which layout they want.

3. Confirm and edit

Show the user a draft of:

• The ## Agent skills block to add to whichever of CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md is being edited (see step 4 for selection rules)
• The contents of docs/agents/issue-tracker.md, docs/agents/domain.md, and docs/agents/triage-labels.md (the last only when triage is installed)

Let them edit before writing.

4. Write

Pick the file to edit:

• If CLAUDE.md exists, edit it.
• Else if AGENTS.md exists, edit it.
• If neither exists, ask the user which one to create — don't pick for them.

Never create AGENTS.md when CLAUDE.md already exists (or vice versa) — always edit the one that's already there.

If an ## Agent skills block already exists in the chosen file, update its contents in-place rather than appending a duplicate. Don't overwrite user edits to the surrounding sections.

The block:

## Agent skills

### Issue tracker

[one-line summary of where issues are tracked]. See `docs/agents/issue-tracker.md`.

### Triage labels

[one-line summary of the label vocabulary]. See `docs/agents/triage-labels.md`.

### Domain docs

[one-line summary of layout — "single-context" or "multi-context"]. See `docs/agents/domain.md`.

Include the ### Triage labels sub-block, and write docs/agents/triage-labels.md, only when triage is installed and Section B ran. When it isn't, both are omitted.

Then write the docs files using the seed templates in this skill's references/ as a starting point:

• issue-tracker-local.md — local-markdown issue tracker
• issue-tracker-github.md — GitHub issue tracker
• issue-tracker-gitlab.md — GitLab issue tracker
• triage-labels.md — label mapping (only if triage is installed)
• domain.md — domain doc consumer rules + layout

Each template carries an attribution footer for this repo's provenance records — drop it when copying the template into the user's repo, where it points nowhere.

For "other" issue trackers, write docs/agents/issue-tracker.md from scratch using the user's description.

5. Done

Tell the user which engineering skills will now read from these files, and that the tracker target has changed from the local-markdown default to whatever they picked (or stayed on it). Mention they can edit docs/agents/*.md directly later — re-running this skill is only necessary if they want to switch issue trackers or restart from scratch.

Adapted from Matt Pocock's "setup-matt-pocock-skills" skill (github.com/mattpocock/skills) — MIT © Matt Pocock. Renamed to setup-skills and de-branded; reframed from a mandatory first run into opt-in configuration over a local-markdown default; the seed templates moved to references/, the consuming-skill list repointed at this repo's roster, and the policy block moved to agents/. See NOTICE.md.