Skill Organizer

A VS Code extension that turns AI skills into portable, version-controlled building blocks you can import, organize, share, and keep in sync across every workspace.

The Problem

AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, Claude, and Cursor support custom skills — markdown files that teach the model domain-specific knowledge, workflows, or coding conventions. Skills are powerful, but managing them is not:

• Copy/paste sprawl — You find a useful skill in a repo or on skills.sh and manually copy it into your project. Then you do it again in the next project. And the next. Every workspace accumulates its own stale snapshot.
• No update path — When the upstream skill improves, you have no way to know or pull the changes. Your local copy silently drifts out of date.
• No curation — You can't easily browse what's available, search for skills by intent, or toggle them on and off per workspace. Skills either exist in the folder or they don't.
• No sharing workflow — You build a great skill locally but there's no streamlined way to contribute it back to a shared repo or the community.
• Inconsistent team setups — Every engineer on the team assembles a different set of skills by hand. There is no profile, no defaults, and no way to sync a baseline.
• No governance — AGENTS.md and skill definitions grow organically with no tooling to audit or reconcile them.

Skill Organizer solves all of this from inside VS Code.

What You Can Do

Import Skills from Anywhere

Connect to GitHub repositories (public or private), paste a skills.sh URL, or point at a GitHub tree path. Skill Organizer discovers every skill in the source and makes them available to browse and enable.

Enable per Workspace, Default Globally

Toggle skills on or off for each workspace independently. Mark your go-to skills as global defaults so they materialize into every project automatically — no more forgetting to set up your favorite skills in a new repo.

Stay in Sync

When a source skill is updated upstream, run Resync or Update Managed Skill to pull the latest version. Skills you've customized locally can be detached from source so sync never overwrites your changes.

Search by Intent

Run Search Skills and describe what you need in plain language — "help me deploy", "set up auth", "write tests". An LLM-powered search ranks your entire catalog by relevance. When no language model is available, fast fuzzy matching takes over.

Contribute Back via PR

Built or improved a skill? Submit Skill as PR opens a pull request against any GitHub repo — an existing source, an arbitrary URL, or a brand-new repo you create on the spot. If you lack push access, the extension forks automatically.

Freeze and Protect

Freeze a skill to prevent it from being accidentally enabled. Detach from source to protect a local copy from sync overwrites. Both states are clearly visible in the tree view.

Manage Conflicts Automatically

If a skill would overwrite an existing local folder, the extension blocks the enable and explains the conflict. Untracked skill folders are auto-detected and reconciled into the manifest on activation.

Govern with AGENTS.md

Run Review AGENTS.md with Copilot to audit your skill definitions and generate a unified diff that keeps global governance rules in sync with your installed skills.

Quick Start

1. Open the Skill Organizer view in the Activity Bar.
2. Click Add Source and choose GitHub or skills.sh.
3. Browse the discovered skills and enable the ones you want.
4. Run Resync Managed Skills to materialize them into .github/skills.
5. Optionally Detach from Source to protect a skill from future syncs.

Features at a Glance

Commands

Manual vs Managed Skills

Skill Organizer tracks materialized folders in .skill-organizer.manifest.json:

{
  "managedFolders": ["example-skill"],
  "manualFolders": ["my-handcrafted-skill"]
}

• Managed skills are updated and replaced by sync.
• Manual skills are protected from sync — they stay exactly as you left them.
• Existing manifests migrate automatically when you upgrade.

Protection Rules

• Sync skips manual folders (they remain untouched).
• Update Managed Skill is only available for managed entries.
• Remove Local Skill requires force confirmation for manual entries.
• Detach from Source and Reconnect to Source move skills between manifest arrays.

Most management actions are also available from the ... title menu in the Skills view.

Configuration

Repository

• Source: github.com/unthinkmedia/skill_organizer
• Issues: github.com/unthinkmedia/skill_organizer/issues