The-Utopia-Studio Market Skill Ingestion
What it does
Turns "here's a good public skill" into one of four decisions and, in the common case, a diff. A market skill is raw material, not a shelf item. This skill extracts the load-bearing value, finds where it already belongs in the studio set, and either folds it in, supersedes a weaker incumbent, rejects it, or (rarely) admits it as new surface. The output is a filled Ingestion Decision Record (template.md) and the concrete change to a target studio skill — never a copied folder.
The rule
Every market skill is, by default, folded into an existing studio skill or rejected. It is never added as new surface, and never vendored wholesale.
The studio optimises for a small premium set. [Fact] Every skill Claude can load costs context for every fellow on every session. So net-new surface has to earn that recurring cost, not just be "good in isolation". The generic instinct is to npx skills add and drop the folder in a category. That is exactly the noise this skill exists to stop. [Fact] skills/product/product-manager-skills/ is a full external repo vendored wholesale — README, CHANGELOG, LICENSE, package.json, bin/, docs/, templates/ all still present. That is the failure mode: one useful idea buried under a repo's worth of dead weight.
Adoption and behaviour outrank author opinion. A skill's install count and real usage are evidence; its README's self-description is not. Weigh the former.
When to use / When NOT
Use this when the source is external and the question is "does this belong in OUR set".
| Situation | Use this? | Use instead |
|---|---|---|
| "Found a skill on skills.sh, should we add it?" | Yes | — |
"Ingest the good parts of owner/repo@skill" |
Yes | — |
| "There's a public skill that does Y — pull it in" | Yes | — |
| "Install a skill so I can use it once, right now" | No | find-skills |
| "Write a brand-new proprietary skill from scratch" | No | CONTRIBUTING sandbox flow |
| "This studio skill overlaps another studio skill" | No | CONTRIBUTING "Kill duplicates" / a consolidation PR |
Do not poach find-skills. That skill discovers and installs for personal use and stops there. This one decides whether external value enters the shared, curated repo and mutates it. Different job.
Method
Run the pipeline in order. Do not skip QUALIFY to get to the interesting part — a low-signal source is a fast REJECT and saves the rest of the work.
1. QUALIFY
Apply the find-skills quality gate before anything else — install count, source reputation, GitHub stars. See skills/meta/find-skills/SKILL.md (the "Verify Quality Before Recommending" section); do not restate it here. Bands as a reminder only: ≥1K installs good, <100 caution. A low-signal source (unknown author, thin repo, no adoption) is a REJECT now — record it and stop.
2. LOCATE the incumbent(s)
Find which studio skill(s) already overlap by category and trigger. The default assumption is that one exists.
# Category first (taxonomy has 9; blur confuses Claude and fellows)
ls skills/<category>/
# Compare on trigger, not title — grep descriptions
grep -ri "<candidate trigger phrase>" skills/*/*/SKILL.md
List every incumbent that shares the candidate's job. If two or more overlap, the candidate is almost certainly a FOLD or a REJECT, not new surface.
3. DISTILL the bones
Extract only the load-bearing, non-obvious value. Write one short list: "what's actually good here". Everything else is discarded.
| Keep (the bones) | Discard (the noise) |
|---|---|
| A non-obvious method, threshold, or checklist | README, CHANGELOG, LICENSE, package.json, bin/ |
| A template or script that does deterministic work | Restated defaults Claude already knows |
| A sharp trigger boundary or gotcha | Prose that repeats basic domain knowledge |
| A specific table/rubric worth reusing | Marketing copy, badges, contributor lists |
If the bones list is empty or is all things a generic prompt would already produce, that is a REJECT. Say so.
4. DECIDE (the gate)
Exactly one of four. FOLD is the default; ADD-NEW is rare and must clear the rubric.
| Decision | Choose when | Action |
|---|---|---|
| FOLD (default) | The bones overlap an incumbent's category + trigger | Patch the distilled value into the incumbent skill; add a provenance line |
| SUPERSEDE | A studio skill does the same job worse | The adapted skill sets supersedes: <incumbent path>, absorbs its useful bones, and beats it; retire the incumbent |
| REJECT | Duplicate, obvious, or low-signal source | State the one-line reason; stop |
| ADD-NEW (rare) | Clears every bar in references/ingestion-rubric.md AND fills a named SKILL_TAXONOMY gap |
Create in skills/sandbox/ first, then graduate via CONTRIBUTING |
ADD-NEW is not a default escape hatch. If any rubric bar fails, downgrade to FOLD or REJECT. Naming a gap is not enough on its own — the rubric must also hold.
5. EMIT the change
Produce the concrete mutation, not a vibe.
- FOLD / SUPERSEDE: describe the diff to the target studio skill — which section, which added lines, which
supersedes:value if used. A patch description, not a pasted folder. - Every decision that lands value carries a one-line provenance record:
Adapted from <source-url>in the target skill (seeproblem-statement's "Provenance" line for the house pattern). - Never copy the raw skill directory into
skills/. If you catch yourself runningcp -r <vendored-repo> skills/…, stop — that is the anti-pattern.
6. RECORD
Fill template.md (the Ingestion Decision Record) for the candidate. If the decision changed a studio skill, flag it for the usage-telemetry review: hooks/log-skill-usage.sh logs which skills actually fire, so a later pass can check whether the folded value earns its place or should be cut.
Evidence standard
Curation weighs behaviour and adoption over opinion, the same ladder the product skills use: real usage / install count (behaviour) outranks a README's claim about itself (opinion). Tag each judgement:
- [Fact] for the source's install count, star count, and what its files literally contain.
- [Assumption] for "this overlaps incumbent X" until you have grepped and confirmed the trigger overlap.
- [Hypothesis] for "fellows will use the folded value" — the
log-skill-usage.shtelemetry is what later confirms or kills it.
Done means: an Ingestion Decision Record exists, the decision is one of the four, and (for FOLD/SUPERSEDE) the emitted diff and provenance line are written. A decision with no target skill named and no reason is not done.
Gotchas
- ADD-NEW as the lazy default. The interesting-sounding path is a new skill. It is also the one that grows the noise this skill exists to prevent. Force it through the rubric every time; most candidates come out as FOLD.
- Grading the README, not the skill. A polished README oversells thin value. Judge the bones and the adoption numbers, not the prose.
- Folding into the wrong incumbent. Overlap by title is not overlap by trigger. Two skills can share a name and do different jobs. Grep the descriptions and match on what actually fires them.
- Silent vendoring. Copying "just the folder for now, we'll clean it later" never gets cleaned. The
product-manager-skillsrepo is the proof. Emit a diff or reject; there is no "temporary" wholesale copy. - Superseding without beating. Setting
supersedes:does not make the new skill better. If it does not absorb the incumbent's useful bones and clearly win, it is a FOLD into the incumbent, not a supersede. - The middle install band. A source between the reminder bands (roughly 100–1K installs) is CAUTION, not a REJECT — proceed to DISTILL and let the bones decide, don't short-circuit on the number alone. Only a genuinely low-signal source (well under 100, unknown author, thin repo) is a QUALIFY-stage reject.
Related skills
skills/meta/find-skills/SKILL.md— discovers and installs skills for personal use, and owns the quality gate this skill reuses in step 1. It stops at "installed"; this skill decides repo entry.skills/meta/skillshare/SKILL.md— the mechanics of installing, tracking, and auditing skills across tools. Use it to fetch a candidate locally for distillation; it does not make the curation decision.CONTRIBUTING.md— the sandbox → graduate flow and the "Kill duplicates / Don't write the obvious / Prefer scripts over prose" curation principles this pipeline enforces. ADD-NEW routes back through it.SKILL_TAXONOMY.md— the 9 categories and the named gaps (Data Retrieval, Code Templates, Runbooks). Only a named gap can justify ADD-NEW.