skilldex

What is Skilldex

Skilldex is a package manager for Claude Code skills. It lets you install, share, and discover skills — reusable instruction sets that extend what Claude Code can do in your projects.

Think of it like npm, but for AI agent capabilities instead of JavaScript libraries.

The problem it solves

Claude Code skills are powerful, but today they live scattered across individual projects with no standard way to share them. If you write a great debugging skill for one repo, there is no easy way to use it in another — let alone share it with the community.

Skilldex fixes this with three things:

  1. A CLI (skillpm) for installing and managing skills
  2. A registry for discovering and publishing skills
  3. A spec that defines what a valid skill looks like

Key concepts

Skills

A skill is a markdown file (or a package containing one) that teaches Claude Code how to do something specific. Examples: forensics-agent, pr-reviewer, test-generator.

Skills are installed into one of three scopes:

  • Global — available in all your Claude Code sessions
  • Shared — available to everyone in a shared environment
  • Project — checked into your repo, available to anyone who clones it

The registry

The Skilldex registry stores metadata about published skills. When you run skillpm install forensics-agent, the CLI looks up the skill in the registry, downloads it, and installs it to the right scope.

Quality scores

Every skill in the registry has a format conformance score (0–100) that measures how well it follows the Skilldex spec. A higher score means the skill is more likely to work correctly across Claude Code versions.

What Skilldex is not

  • Not a plugin system — skills are instruction sets, not code that runs in Claude
  • Not a model fine-tuning tool — skills work with any Claude version
  • Not a replacement for CLAUDE.md — skills complement project-level instructions

Next steps