Setup Skills

Set up skills

Lay down the per-repo configuration the engineering skills rely on:

• Issue tracker — where issues live (GitHub by default; local markdown also works out of the box)
• Triage labels — the strings that stand in for the five canonical triage roles
• Domain docs — where CONTEXT.md and ADRs live, and how consumers should read them

This is prompt-driven, not a deterministic script. Explore, show what you found, confirm with the user, then write.

Process

1. Explore

Inspect the repo to learn its starting state. Read what's actually there rather than assuming:

• git remote -v and .git/config — is this a GitHub repo? Which one?
• AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md at the repo root — does either exist? Does either already carry an ## Agent skills section?
• CONTEXT.md and CONTEXT-MAP.md at the repo root
• docs/adr/ and any src/*/docs/adr/ directories
• docs/agents/ — has this skill already produced output here?
• .scratch/ — a sign a local-markdown issue tracker convention is already in play

2. Present findings and ask

Summarise what exists and what's missing. Then walk the user through the three decisions one at a time — show a section, take the user's answer, then move on. Don't dump all three at once.

Assume the user hasn't met these terms before. Open each section with a short explainer (what it is, why these skills need it, what shifts if they choose otherwise). Then lay out the choices and the default.

Section A — Issue tracker.

> Explainer: The "issue tracker" is where this repo's issues live. Skills like to-issues, triage, and to-prd read from and write to it — they need to know whether to reach for gh issue create, drop a markdown file under .scratch/, or follow some other workflow you describe. Pick the place you genuinely track work for this repo.

Default posture: these skills were built for GitHub. If a git remote points at GitHub, propose that. If a git remote points at GitLab (gitlab.com or a self-hosted host), propose GitLab. Otherwise (or if the user prefers), offer:

• GitHub — issues live in the repo's GitHub Issues (uses the gh CLI)
• GitLab — issues live in the repo's GitLab Issues (uses the glab CLI)
• Local markdown — issues live as files under .scratch// in this repo (good for solo projects or repos without a remote)
• Other (Jira, Linear, etc.) — ask the user to describe the workflow in one paragraph; the skill records it as freeform prose

If — and only if — the user picked GitHub or GitLab, ask one follow-up:

> Explainer: Open-source repos often get feature requests as pull requests, not just issues — a PR is an issue with code attached. Turn this on and /triage folds external PRs into the same queue, running them through the same labels and states as issues (collaborators' in-flight PRs are left alone). Leave it off if PRs aren't a request surface for you.

• PRs as a request surface — yes / no (default: no). Record the answer in docs/agents/issue-tracker.md. For local-markdown and other trackers, skip this question — there are no PRs.

Section B — Triage label vocabulary.

> Explainer: When the triage skill handles an incoming issue, it walks it through a state machine — needs evaluation, waiting on reporter, ready for an AFK agent to grab, ready for a human, or won't fix. To do that it applies labels (or your tracker's equivalent) that match strings you've actually set up. If your repo already uses different names (say bug:triage instead of needs-triage), map them here so the skill reaches for the right ones instead of minting duplicates.

The five canonical roles:

• needs-triage — maintainer needs to evaluate
• needs-info — waiting on reporter
• ready-for-agent — fully specified, AFK-ready (an agent can grab it with no human context)
• ready-for-human — needs human implementation
• wontfix — will not be actioned

Default: each role's string equals its name. Ask whether the user wants to override any. If their tracker has no existing labels, the defaults are fine.

Section C — Domain docs.

> Explainer: Some skills (improve-codebase-architecture, diagnosing-bugs, tdd) read a CONTEXT.md file to pick up the project's domain language, and docs/adr/ for past architectural decisions. They need to know whether the repo runs one global context or several (say a monorepo with separate frontend/backend contexts) so they look in the right place.

Confirm the layout:

• Single-context — one CONTEXT.md + docs/adr/ at the repo root. Most repos are this.
• Multi-context — CONTEXT-MAP.md at the root pointing to per-context CONTEXT.md files (typically a monorepo).

3. Confirm and edit

Show the user a draft of:

• The ## Agent skills block to add to whichever of CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md you're editing (selection rules in step 4)
• The contents of docs/agents/issue-tracker.md, docs/agents/triage-labels.md, docs/agents/domain.md

Let them edit before you write.

4. Write

Pick the file to edit:

• If CLAUDE.md exists, edit it.
• Else if AGENTS.md exists, edit it.
• If neither exists, ask the user which to create — don't decide for them.

Never create AGENTS.md when CLAUDE.md already exists (or vice versa) — always edit the one already there.

If an ## Agent skills block already exists in the chosen file, update its contents in place rather than appending a duplicate. Leave the user's edits to the surrounding sections alone.

The block:

## Agent skills

### Issue tracker

[one-line summary of where issues are tracked, plus whether external PRs are a triage surface]. See `docs/agents/issue-tracker.md`.

### Triage labels

[one-line summary of the label vocabulary]. See `docs/agents/triage-labels.md`.

### Domain docs

[one-line summary of layout — "single-context" or "multi-context"]. See `docs/agents/domain.md`.

Then write the three docs files, seeding them from the templates in this skill folder:

• [issue-tracker-github.md](./issue-tracker-github.md) — GitHub issue tracker
• [issue-tracker-gitlab.md](./issue-tracker-gitlab.md) — GitLab issue tracker
• [issue-tracker-local.md](./issue-tracker-local.md) — local-markdown issue tracker
• [triage-labels.md](./triage-labels.md) — label mapping
• [domain.md](./domain.md) — domain doc consumer rules + layout

For "other" issue trackers, write docs/agents/issue-tracker.md from scratch out of the user's description.

5. Done

Tell the user setup is complete and which engineering skills will now read from these files. Note that they can edit docs/agents/*.md directly later — re-running this skill is only needed to switch issue trackers or start over.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: officialunofficial
• Source: officialunofficial/skills
• License: Apache-2.0

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.