Skill Provenance

skill-provenance

A portable agent skill for maintaining skill-source.json sidecars next to reusable skills.

The skill helps agents:

• record source material, attribution, licenses, and update-check hints for each skill;
• detect cheap upstream update candidates without automatically importing changes;
• keep provenance in a portable JSON format that travels with the skill folder;
• validate sidecars against a documented schema before publishing or sharing skills.

You can install the skill in many modes, including:

• Clone the repo and copy the skills/skill-provenance/ directory into your agent skills directory, for example .agents/skills/skill-provenance/.
• Use npx skills add rock3r/skill-provenance and similar mechanisms

Claude Code

The repo ships a Claude Code plugin manifest (.claude-plugin/plugin.json) and marketplace (.claude-plugin/marketplace.json). Add the marketplace from GitHub, then install the plugin:

claude plugin marketplace add rock3r/skill-provenance
claude plugin install skill-provenance@skill-provenance

Validate locally:

claude plugin validate .

OpenAI Codex

The repo ships a Codex plugin manifest (.codex-plugin/plugin.json) and marketplace (.agents/plugins/marketplace.json). Add the marketplace from GitHub, then install the plugin:

codex plugin marketplace add rock3r/skill-provenance
codex plugin add skill-provenance@skill-provenance

Validate locally with OpenAI's plugin validator:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openai/codex/main/codex-rs/skills/src/assets/samples/plugin-creator/scripts/validate_plugin.py -o /tmp/validate_plugin.py
python3 /tmp/validate_plugin.py .

Both manifests point skills at ./skills/, so each platform discovers skills/skill-provenance/SKILL.md as the bundled skill.

Quick validation

From this repository root:

python3 skills/skill-provenance/scripts/test_check_skill_updates.py
python3 skills/skill-provenance/scripts/check_skill_updates.py --skills-root skills
python3 -m json.tool skills/skill-provenance/skill-source.json

From a project that stores skills under .agents/skills:

python3 .agents/skills/skill-provenance/scripts/check_skill_updates.py --skills-root .agents/skills

License

Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE.

Copyright 2026 Sebastiano Poggi

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.