Z Skills
23 core skills that plan, build, test, fix, and ship — so one
developer can run a full engineering team. (21 user-facing slash
commands, 2 internal helpers, and a battery of safety hooks.)
Z Skills encodes hard-won lessons from real agent failures into reusable
prompt files. Each skill is a .claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md file that
teaches Claude Code how to drive a specific workflow with the discipline
that prevents the most common AI agent failure modes: skipping
verification, weakening tests, deferring hard parts, and shipping broken
code.
Docs
Read the docs in the in-browser docs viewer or here in the repo.
New users may want to explore Installing zskills,
the Workflows guide, or the
Skill reference.
For a higher level view see the ZSkills presentation →.
The Skills
Install
By default zskills installs as a Claude Code plugin.
From inside a Claude Code session in your project:
/plugin marketplace add zeveck/zskills
/plugin install zs@zskills
Then restart Claude Code (or /clear) so we can finish setup — the
SessionStart hook materialises zskills' consumer-side artifacts on the next
session start (plugins cannot write at install time). Finally, run:
/update-zskills
to confirm the install and check your environment (it reports whether git,
Python, and gh are present). Until you run it, a one-line greeting on startup
reminds you.
zskills needs git and bash. Its worktree, commit, and cherry-pick
machinery is built on git, and its hooks and helper scripts run under
bash. /update-zskills reports whether git (and gh, for PR-mode landing)
are present; bash is assumed by every shipped script.
This is not a pip/npm package — do not pip install or npm install it.
The repo contains prompt files and scripts.
Plugin vs. direct install
There's a more flexible direct install alternative — instead of the plugin,
it copies the skill source straight into your repo's .claude/. Same skills,
same behavior; the visible differences are the slash prefix and where the source
lives. Pick one — running both at once isn't a supported end-state (run
scripts/switch-install-path.sh to consolidate).
| Plugin | /update-zskills (direct) |
|---|
| Install | /plugin marketplace add zeveck/zskills
/plugin install zs@zskills | clone + copy skills, then /update-zskills install |
| Update | /plugin marketplace update | /update-zskills install |
| Slash prefix | /zs:run-plan, /zs:do | bare /run-plan, /do |
| Skill source in your repo | no (plugin-managed) | yes (copied into .claude/) |
For more details see
Installing zskills.
/update-zskills install
Tell your agent (copy-paste):
Install zskills from github.com/zeveck/zskills — see repo for directions
A capable agent will clone the repo, copy the skills into your
project, and run /update-zskills to complete setup. Full manual steps
are below if you prefer to drive it yourself.
Steps
-
Clone the repo (if not already cloned):
git clone https://github.com/zeveck/zskills.git /tmp/zskills
-
Copy skills from the clone into your project:
mkdir -p .claude/skills
cp -r /tmp/zskills/skills/* .claude/skills/
-
Run /update-zskills to complete setup. This is the important
step — it creates CLAUDE.md with auto-detected project settings,
installs hooks and scripts, registers hooks in settings.json,
writes .claude/zskills-config.json, verifies dependencies, and
reports any gaps. On a greenfield project it will ask you a single
question: which landing mode you want (see below).
That's it. /update-zskills handles everything beyond the initial skill
copy.
First-run choice: landing mode
On a fresh project /update-zskills will prompt:
How should /run-plan land changes?
(1) cherry-pick — each phase squash-lands directly to main (simple, solo)
(2) locked-main-pr — plans become feature branches + PRs, CI, auto-merge
(locked main, shared repo)
(3) direct — work on main, no worktree isolation (minimal, risky)
You can also pass the preset directly — no prompt — when you already know
what you want:
/update-zskills cherry-pick
/update-zskills locked-main-pr
/update-zskills direct
