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Tutorials

Skillsmith is the lifecycle manager for agent skills. These tutorials walk you through every stage of that lifecycle in order — from finding your first skill to retiring one that has outlived its purpose.

These tutorials show Skillsmith in Claude Code. For installation in your preferred runtime (Cursor, Continue, Copilot, Windsurf), see Getting Started.

The Skillsmith lifecycle

Every agent skill moves through eight stages. You can revisit Maintain, Use, and Author indefinitely; Discover, Evaluate, Install, Govern, and Retire bracket the lifespan of any single installed skill on your machine or your team's.

1. Discover

Find skills by keyword, recommendation, or filter. Two MCP tools and two CLI subcommands. Bare prompts in Claude Code now bind directly to the registry.

2. Evaluate

Compare candidates side-by-side, read trust badges, and view diffs between versions before committing to an install.

3. Install & Use

Install a skill into your runtime's skills directory, then invoke it in conversation. Includes the troubleshooting steps for skills that do not trigger.

4. Maintain

Update installed skills, pin to a specific version, audit your local inventory for namespace collisions, and configure audit modes.

5. Author

Scaffold, validate, and publish your own skill — including subagent, transform, and MCP-init variants. CLI-led, end-to-end.

6. Govern

Query audit logs, export to SIEM, and apply namespace policy at team scale. Team and Enterprise tiers.

7. Retire

Uninstall a skill cleanly. One command, one outcome — but worth doing deliberately so you do not leave orphaned references behind.

How to read these tutorials

Each tutorial uses Claude Code as the worked-example runtime. Where a workflow is surface-specific (for example, pin and unpin are CLI-only), the tutorial calls that out inline: "Run this in your terminal: skillsmith pin <skill>".

MCP tool calls are documented as natural-language prompts you type to Claude Code, not as JSON tool-call payloads. Implementation details for each tool live in the MCP Server reference. Universal CLI syntax is in the CLI reference.

Prerequisites

  • Skillsmith MCP server installed in your runtime — see Getting Started. Tutorials assume the server is running and reachable.
  • Skillsmith CLI installed for stages that touch the filesystem directly: npm install -g @skillsmith/cli. The CLI ships as skillsmith and the shorthand sklx.
  • An API key if you plan to issue more than a handful of requests. Free tier covers personal exploration. See the API key setup section for configuration.

Where to next

Start with Discover if Skillsmith is new to you. If you already have skills installed and want to keep them healthy, jump to Maintain. If you are ready to publish your own skill, Author walks the full path from author init to author publish.