Skill Catalog

CLI-JAW ships 230 skills across 11 categories. 30 are active by default (injected into the system prompt); the remaining 200 are reference skills available on demand via jaw skill install.

Quick Commands

How Skills Work

Each skill lives in a directory with a SKILL.md file. Active skills are injected into the agent's system prompt via getSystemPrompt(). Reference skills appear in the "available skills" list so the agent knows they exist but does not load their content until activated.

# Active skills directory
~/.cli-jaw/skills/
  dev/SKILL.md
  browser/SKILL.md
  memory/SKILL.md
  ...

# Reference skills directory
~/.cli-jaw/skills_ref/
  registry.json
  cloudflare/SKILL.md
  docker/SKILL.md
  ...

Employee prompts (getEmployeePromptV2()) inject role-specific and phase-specific skills automatically. A "Frontend" employee gets dev-frontend; during the Check phase, employees get dev-testing.

Skill Directory

Search by name, description, or category. Use the dropdown to filter by category or status.

Showing 230 of 230 skills

Default Active Skills (30)

These skills are loaded into the system prompt out of the box. They cover the most common development and workflow scenarios.

Two more skills — k-writing and lecture-stt — are also active by default but ship as private runtime skills outside the public registry.

Installing and Managing Skills

Install a Reference Skill

# Install a single skill
jaw skill install cloudflare

# Install multiple skills at once
jaw skill install docker kubernetes terraform

# Install all skills in a category
jaw skill install --category "Cloud & Deploy"

Remove a Skill

# Remove a skill (moves back to reference)
jaw skill remove cloudflare

# Remove multiple
jaw skill remove docker kubernetes

Check Skill Info

# Detailed info about a skill
jaw skill info dev-frontend

# Output:
#   Name:     dev-frontend
#   Status:   active
#   Category: Development
#   Path:     ~/.cli-jaw/skills/dev-frontend/SKILL.md
#   Size:     4.2 KB
#   Lines:    127

Reset to Defaults

# Reset all skills to the 30 defaults
jaw skill reset

# Force reset (no confirmation prompt)
jaw skill reset --force

Category Breakdown

Creating Custom Skills

Add your own domain knowledge by creating a skill directory:

mkdir -p ~/.cli-jaw/skills/my-company
cat > ~/.cli-jaw/skills/my-company/SKILL.md << 'EOF'
# My Company Standards

Internal coding standards and domain knowledge.

## When to Use

Trigger when working on any project in ~/work/ directory.

## Rules

1. Use pnpm instead of npm.
2. All APIs must follow our internal OpenAPI spec.
3. Database migrations use Drizzle ORM.

## Templates

```typescript
// Standard API response format
interface ApiResponse<T> {
  success: boolean;
  data: T;
  error?: string;
  timestamp: string;
}
```
EOF

Skill File Structure

Every skill is a directory containing at minimum a SKILL.md file. Complex skills may include reference subdirectories:

~/.cli-jaw/skills/dev-frontend/
  SKILL.md              # Main skill prompt (injected into system prompt)
  references/
    react.md            # Deep guidance for React
    vue.md              # Deep guidance for Vue
    svelte.md           # Deep guidance for Svelte
    tailwind.md         # Tailwind-specific rules

The SKILL.md acts as an orchestrator. It contains high-level rules and references the sub-files when deeper context is needed.

Slash Commands for Skills