Magpie List Skills

list-skills

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• Pre-flight — is this project set up?

Pre-flight — is this project set up?

Do this first, before anything else in this skill, and do it silently: on the happy path it costs three file checks and prints nothing.

A marketplace install delivers skills only. Nothing in it configures this repository, and on most harnesses no code runs at all when a plugin is installed or upgraded — there is no post-install step to rely on. Claude Code's SessionStart hook covers only the all-in-one plugin, so for every other install this check is the one thing standing between a stale or unadopted repo and a skill that acts on wrong assumptions.

1. Is a lock present? If .apache-magpie.lock exists, this project uses the pinned-snapshot install. Compare it with .apache-magpie.local.lock:
   • local lock missing → the snapshot was never fetched on this machine;
   • ref / commit differ → this machine is on a different framework version than the project pins.
2. No lock? Then this is the marketplace install (or nothing at all). Look for a <project-config>/ directory. If there is none, the project has not been adopted and every <placeholder> in this skill is unresolved.
3. Anything unresolved above → stop and propose /magpie-setup (or /magpie-setup upgrade for a version mismatch). Say which of the three checks failed and what you found. Do not run setup unattended and do not continue this skill on a guess: a skill that proceeds against an unadopted repo writes to the wrong tracker.

Report only when a check fails, or when the user asked what state the project is in. /magpie-setup verify is the full diagnostic — this is deliberately the cheap subset that is worth paying for on every invocation.

Print a human-readable index of the skills installed for this repository. The index is generated on every run from live SKILL.md frontmatter — there is no cached copy to keep in sync. The skill exists for humans (newcomers reading the repo, maintainers checking what is available); agents route invocations via the same frontmatter the script reads, so this skill is purely informational.

What counts as "installed" depends on how Magpie was put in place, so the script covers all three shapes and labels which one each entry came from:

Prerequisites

• Python 3.11+ on PATH. Nothing else — the script is stdlib-only, as skills/pyproject.toml requires of every helper script in this tree, and declares that contract in PEP 723 inline metadata. uv run --script and a bare python3 therefore behave identically.

Step 1 — Run the listing script

Run the bundled script and present its output to the user verbatim:

python3 .claude/skills/magpie-list-skills/scripts/list_skills.py

Run that command literally, as written — do not expand it to an absolute path. It is a repository-relative path that resolves under both install methods that put skills in the repository: a pinned snapshot install and the framework checkout both carry .claude/skills/magpie-list-skills as a symlink onto the real skill directory.

For a layout that puts each description on its own indented line (easier to read when descriptions are long), pass --verbose; to inspect a repository other than the enclosing one, pass --root:

python3 .claude/skills/magpie-list-skills/scripts/list_skills.py --verbose
python3 .claude/skills/magpie-list-skills/scripts/list_skills.py --root /path/to/repo

Marketplace installs are the one exception. They write nothing into the repository, so that path does not exist — the skill lives in the plugin cache. Build the command from the base directory reported for this skill instead:

python3 <the base directory reported for this skill>/scripts/list_skills.py

The script:

• resolves the repository from git rev-parse --show-toplevel (or --root), not from its own location — under a per-family plugin install its own location is one family, not the whole install;
• walks the agent-target directories that install writes into (.agents/skills/ and its relays — the registry in ../setup/agents.md is the source of truth), the framework's own skills/ when the repo is the framework checkout, and the sibling plugins in the marketplace cache when it is running from one;
• de-duplicates by the name you would type, so relay directories collapse to one entry while a skill available from two install methods keeps both — they are two different things to type;
• groups by each skill's declared family: frontmatter key, per Golden rule 8. Family is never inferred from the name prefix: repo-health and contributor-growth span several prefixes, and write-skill is family utilities, not family write. A skill that declares no family lands in other;
• prints each entry with the first sentence of its description, then a summary of which install each entry came from.

Step 2 — Hand the output to the user

Quote the script output back to the user as-is. Do not paraphrase, summarise, or re-order — the value of this skill is that the listing is the canonical, deterministic view of what exists. If the user asks for more detail on a specific skill, read that skill's SKILL.md and answer from it.

Hard rules

• Read-only. This skill never edits, creates, or deletes files. It only reads SKILL.md files under the install directories listed above.
• No paraphrasing. Always present the script output verbatim. Paraphrasing reintroduces the staleness this skill exists to prevent.

References

• scripts/list_skills.py — the listing script Step 1 invokes.
• AGENTS.md — the framework's "Reusable skills" section, which explains the skills layout and frontmatter convention.
• ../setup/agents.md — the agent-target registry the discovery list mirrors.
• ../../docs/setup/marketplaces.md — why the invocation name differs between install methods.
• write-skill — sibling skill for authoring a new skill. Use it when the listing reveals a gap that warrants a new entry.