ipman-cli 0.4.0

Intelligence Package Manager - Agent skill virtual environment manager

IpMan - Intelligence Package Manager

I can take on ten.

The skills housekeeper for AI agents. Discover, organize, absorb, dedup and clean the skills already on your machine — like a disk-cleanup utility, but for agent skills. It never installs and never destroys.

Documentation | 中文文档 | 中文 README

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What it is (and is not)

Skills pile up: copied folders, half-remembered clones, duplicates across projects, broken leftovers. Your agent's own tooling installs skills — but nothing tidies them.

IpMan is that missing housekeeper. It does not install or uninstall skills — your agent's native mechanisms keep doing that. IpMan handles what they don't:

Verb	What it does
scan / status	See every skills directory (user-global and per-project) and the true state of each skill: real dir, symlink, broken, duplicate, suite-managed
absorb	Take loose skill folders into one central store (a fresh git repo each — changes tracked from then on) and leave a symlink in place. Your agent notices nothing
dedup	Find byte-identical copies across projects and merge them onto one stored original
clean	Broken links, orphaned store entries, empty shells — quarantined to ~/.ipman/trash, never deleted
enable / disable	Switch a skill off without losing it (the link goes, the original stays), switch it back on anytime
pack	Name a set of skills and enable/disable them as one unit, in any scope
takeover / release	Optionally put a whole skills directory in IpMan's custody: survives accidental rm -rf, restorable with one sync

Everything destructive is dry-run first and quarantined — recoverable, always.

Quick start

pipx install ipman-cli        # or: pip install ipman-cli / uv tool install ipman-cli

ipman                         # in a terminal: the interactive TUI
ipman status                  # or the same, as plain text
ipman scan                    # deep scan: wild skills, duplicates, cleanables

Typical first session:

ipman absorb --user           # inventory of ~/.claude/skills: what's absorbable
ipman absorb --user my-notes  # take one over (moved to store, symlinked back)
ipman dedup                   # duplicate report (dry-run)
ipman clean                   # cleanables report (dry-run)

Use it from inside your agent

Install the companion skill (explicitly — IpMan never auto-installs anything, not even itself):

ipman skill-sync --scope claude-code-user

Then just tell your agent "整理一下我的技能" / "clean up my skills" — it drives the same engine through --json commands, with confirmation before every write. The skill keeps itself in lockstep with the CLI (ipman skill-sync --check).

Add IpMan to your agent's status bar:

ipman statusline    # -> 📦 user⚑12 | myproj✓3     (⚑ in custody, ✓ native)

Wire it into Claude Code by adding it to your statusLine command in settings.json.

Safety model

• Never installs, never uninstalls — organization only
• Dry-run first: dedup/clean report before --apply
• Quarantine, not deletion: clean --apply moves to ~/.ipman/trash; --empty-trash is a separate, explicit step
• Pinned read-only originals: absorbed skills link to read-only snapshots — even a trailing-slash rm -rf can't gut the store
• Suites, clones and marketplace plugins are left alone: anything with its own manager or upstream is reported, never touched

Status

v3 (0.4.x): the housekeeper surface is new; verified on macOS with Claude Code. Windows: per-skill operations expected to work (junction fallback, CI-tested), directory takeover pending a Windows verification pass. Feedback and issues welcome.

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE for details.