Agent Skills Manager (VS Code extension)

Give your AI coding agents the right knowledge for your stack in one click.

This extension adds skills to a project: small folders containing a SKILL.md that follow the open Agent Skills standard, understood by Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, OpenCode and others. It ships a curated catalog for popular languages, frameworks, libraries and tooling, detects what your project uses, and installs matching skills into the directory your agent reads.

It also ships three engineering workflow skills that change how an agent works, not just what it knows:

How "always on" and slash commands work

Agents load a skill only when a request looks relevant, so a skill alone cannot guarantee it runs every time. When you install a skill that declares an always-on rule (currently plan-feature), the extension writes that rule into the agent's instruction file inside a managed block:

The block is delimited by <!-- agent-skills-scaffold:begin --> and <!-- agent-skills-scaffold:end -->, is rewritten when skills are added or removed, and never touches the rest of the file. Generated command files carry a generated-by: agent-skills-scaffold marker; a command file you wrote yourself with the same name is left alone. Turn either behaviour off with agentSkills.enforceRules or agentSkills.createSlashCommands, and run Agent Skills: Re-apply Always-on Rules and Slash Commands after changing targets.

Quick start

1. Install the extension and open a project.
2. Open the Agent Skills view in the activity bar (or run Agent Skills: Add Recommended Skills for This Project).
3. Confirm the pre-selected skills. They are copied to .claude/skills/<skill>/ by default.
4. Start your agent. It will load the skills automatically when relevant (for example, when you ask it to "add a feature", the plan-feature skill kicks in and asks for approval first).

Commands

App Store review audit

appstore-review is recommended automatically for iOS-capable projects (native Xcode, React Native, Expo, Flutter, Capacitor). Ask the agent to "audit this app for App Store review". It inspects the whole project against Apple's App Store Review Guidelines without changing code, and writes docs/reviews/<date>-appstore-review.md. The report has an issue register listing every problem found, with severity, guideline, file:line evidence, fix, effort and status, plus checklist coverage, items to confirm manually, and App Review notes to prepare.

Click the ▶ play button next to the skill in the Agent Skills view to start the audit directly. It installs the skill if needed, then opens a terminal running claude with the audit prompt (Claude Code), opens Copilot Chat in agent mode (Copilot), or copies the prompt to the clipboard (other agents). Change this with agentSkills.runWith.

Where skills are installed

With several targets selected, the first target gets the real files and the others get relative symlinks to it, so there is one copy to edit and commit. Set agentSkills.linkSecondaryTargets to false to copy instead.

Each installed skill folder also contains a small .agent-skills.json manifest recording where it came from and its version. Delete it if you want to detach the skill from updates.

Stack detection

The extension reads dependency manifests in the top two directory levels (package.json, requirements*.txt, pyproject.toml, Pipfile, go.mod, Cargo.toml, pom.xml, build.gradle[.kts], Gemfile, composer.json, *.csproj, pubspec.yaml, Package.swift, Podfile) and samples source file extensions, skipping node_modules, build outputs and virtual environments. Nothing leaves your machine.

Settings

Bundled catalog

Run Agent Skills: Add Skills to Project... to see the full list. Categories:

• Engineering workflows: plan-feature, design-doc, review-pr.
• Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Go, Rust, Java, Kotlin, C#, C++, Swift, Ruby, PHP, Dart, Scala, SQL, Bash.
• Frameworks: React, Next.js, Vue, Nuxt, Angular, Svelte/SvelteKit, React Router/Remix, Astro, React Native, Flutter, Express, NestJS, Fastify, Hono, FastAPI, Django, Flask, Spring Boot, Rails, Laravel, ASP.NET Core, Gin.
• Libraries: Tailwind CSS, Prisma, Drizzle, SQLAlchemy, TanStack Query, Redux Toolkit, Zustand, Zod, GraphQL, Pydantic, pandas, React Hook Form, Socket.IO, HTTP clients.
• Tooling: Apple App Store review audit, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Vitest, Jest, pytest, Playwright, Cypress, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, ESLint/Prettier, Git workflow.

Where a community skill exists for the same topic, the catalog entry records it as a verified upstream source (189 entries across 66 topics, including official skills from Angular, Prisma, Laravel, Docker, HashiCorp, MongoDB, Redis, Pydantic, Flutter, Expo, Hono, Kotlin and .NET). Use Install Community Version... on a skill to fetch one of them from GitHub.

Writing your own skills

Agent Skills: Create New Skill in Project... scaffolds a SKILL.md. Keep the frontmatter name equal to the folder name and write a description that says when the skill should be used; agents read only the description to decide whether to load the rest. See docs/SKILL-AUTHORING.md for the conventions used by the bundled skills and how to contribute one.

Development

npm install
npm run build        # builds catalog.json, type-checks, bundles to dist/
npm test             # validates skills, builds catalog, runs unit tests
npm run package      # produces a .vsix

Press F5 in VS Code to launch an Extension Development Host.

License

MIT. Bundled skills are MIT as well; community skills installed from GitHub keep their own licenses, which you should review.