workspace-skill-discovery

Workspace Skill Discovery

Purpose

The global skills in ~/.claude/skills/ are auto-registered in the system prompt, but project-level skills stored inside workspace repos are NOT. This skill ensures you always discover and acknowledge ALL skills.

When to Trigger

• Always when the user asks "what skills are available?" or similar
• At session start if the user asks about capabilities
• Before any task that might benefit from project-specific knowledge

Discovery Procedure

1. Search the entire workspace for skills directories:

   find <workspace_folders> -type d -name "skills" 2>/dev/null
   

2. List skill files in each discovered directory:

   find <skills_dir> -type f \( -name "SKILL.md" -o -name "*.md" \) | head -50
   

3. Report ALL skills organized by location:

   • Global (~/.claude/skills/) — curated/installed skills
   • Project-level (.claude/skills/ inside repos) — custom workflow skills
   • Repo-level (skills/ folders) — domain-specific knowledge

4. Read project-level SKILL.md files when they are relevant to the current task — they contain domain-specific workflows the global skills don't cover.

Installed packages (vendor) are a third source

A signed package installed with octo pkg lives in skills/vendor/<name> and is reachable at skills/<name> through a symlink. Both are gitignored, so a git ls-files or a diff of the brain will not show them, and the tracked connectome deliberately does not index them either (a package name can be private). They still run on every prompt. List them at session start:

python3 ~/.claude/scripts/octo_pkg.py list

Report them as their own group, with their version and signer, next to the global and project-level skills. A package whose row reads WARN is in the lock but not on disk (octo pkg sync restores it); one that reads FAIL has drifted from its signature and should not be trusted until it is reinstalled.

Known Skill Locations (Update as needed)

Location	Type	Example Topics
~/.claude/skills/	Global (36+)	Deploys, security, docs, media, etc.
~/.claude/skills/vendor/	Installed packages	Signed, locked in packages.lock.json; list with octo pkg list
portfolio_repo/projects/portfolio_site/.claude/skills/	Project	CV update, CV sync audit, security audit, deploy
client-a/skills/	Project	45 PostgreSQL/DB engineering patterns

Key Rule

Never list only global skills. Always run the filesystem search to find project-level skills too. Project skills often contain the most valuable, context-specific workflows.