Z Skills

⚠️ This is zskills-dev, the development repository. End users should install from the public mirror at github.com/zeveck/zskills. Content here is pre-release and may include experimental skills, canary plans, and in-progress work. The release workflow above strips dev-only artifacts and publishes to prod — maintainers only.

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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 the plugin loads, and run the one-time setup:

/zs:update-zskills

This init adds a .zskills/ line to your .gitignore, offers an optional project config, verifies the install, and checks your environment (it reports whether git, Python, and gh are present). The plugin itself writes nothing into your repo — until you run the init, 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 (to switch, uninstall one and install the other; see the install guide).

	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

1. Clone the repo (if not already cloned):

   git clone https://github.com/zeveck/zskills.git /tmp/zskills
   

2. Copy skills from the clone into your project:

   mkdir -p .claude/skills
   cp -r /tmp/zskills/skills/* .claude/skills/