Skill Help

/skill-help — Agent Reference

Purpose: Show available skills and their usage. With no argument, list all user-invokable skills with descriptions. With a name, show detailed help for that skill.

When to Use

• User asks "what skills/skills are available" or "what can you do"
• User asks for help on a specific skill by name
• User is new to the repo and needs an orientation

When NOT to Use

• User already named a skill and wants it executed — invoke it directly
• You need the runtime's built-in help (Claude Code, Kimi, etc.) — use /help

Arguments

• (none) — list all available skills
• <name> — show detailed help for the named skill (e.g., /skill-help plan)

Workflow

List Mode (no argument)

1. Discover skills. Find all top-level SKILL.md files at .claude/skills/*/SKILL.md — these are user-invokable skills. Do NOT include nested sub-skills (specialists, analysts, writers under a parent skill directory) — those are internal to skill workflows.

2. Read frontmatter. For each discovered SKILL.md, extract the name and description fields from the YAML frontmatter.

3. Group by category. Organize skills into these groups based on their purpose:

   Category	Skills

   | **Planning & Design** | grill-me, ideate, thesis, ubiquitous-language, what-is-it-about, goal, design-twice, refactor-brief, drawio |
   | **Development** | audit-existing, execute-prd, execute-plan, kickoff, validate-plan, test-plan, hotfix, triage, parallel-optimization, process-tune, issue-slices, modernize |
   | **Quality** | domain-review, code-review-professional, review-gauntlet, review-adversarial, checkpoint |
   

   | Specs & Requirements | spec-review-adversarial, prd-acceptance, prd-create, prd-validate | | Investigation | code-investigate, postmortem, bug-session | | Source Control | pr, ship, sync-main, changelog | | Operations | k8s-verify, dep-audit, dep-migrate, env-check, gh-readiness | | Team & Workflow | work-item | | Session | repo-status | | Configuration | configure | | Meta | skill-help, skill-audit, feature-sweep, vault |

   This table is a suggested default. Always read the filesystem first — any skill not in the table goes to an "Other" category. If a project has skills in .claude/skills/_project/, include them under "Project-Specific". Non-skill assets (e.g. pr-guardrail/ — a hook utility with no SKILL.md) should be excluded, not categorized.

4. Present as a table per category:

   ## Planning & Design
   
   | Skill | Description |
   |-------|-------------|
       | `/thesis` | Interrogate the product or architectural thesis |
   | `/grill-me` | Stress-test a plan or design by walking every decision branch |
   

5. Footer. Add: Run /skill-help <name> for detailed usage of any skill.

Detail Mode (<name> provided)

1. Find the skill. Look for .claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md. If not found, search case-insensitively and suggest the closest match.

2. Read the full SKILL.md. Present to the user:

   • Name and description from frontmatter
   • Purpose — the first paragraph after the heading
   • Arguments — the arguments section if present
   • Workflow summary — the major phases/steps (headings only, not full content)
   • When to use — the "When to Use" section if present

3. Format concisely. Don't dump the entire SKILL.md — summarize the workflow into a readable overview.

Rules

• User-invokable only. Only list skills at .claude/skills/*/SKILL.md (depth 1) unless frontmatter says user-invocable: false. Never list _internal, specialists, analysts, foundations, or writers nested under a parent skill.
• Dynamic discovery. Always read from the filesystem — don't hardcode the list. Projects add custom skills to _project/.
• Concise output. List mode should fit on one screen. Detail mode should give enough to use the skill without reading the SKILL.md.
• Use "skill" terminology consistently. This is a skills library; the slash command surface matches the skill names.