skill-guard 0.4.4

The quality gate for Agent Skills — validate, secure, conflict-detect, and test skills across their full lifecycle

skill-guard

The quality gate for Agent Skills.

skill-guard is a CLI tool that validates, secures, and governs Agent Skills across their full lifecycle — from contribution to production monitoring.

The Problem

Agent Skills are powerful. They're also ungoverned. As soon as more than one person contributes skills to a shared agent, things break in hard-to-diagnose ways:

• A new skill's description overlaps with an existing one → agent picks the wrong skill half the time
• Skills with dangerous scripts get merged because nobody reviewed the scripts/ directory
• Nobody knows what skills are installed, who owns them, or whether they still work
• A skill passes every test in isolation but fails when the real agent uses it with 25 other skills loaded

skill-guard is the quality gate that catches these problems before they reach production.

What It Does

ONBOARDING (pre-merge, in CI):
  skill-guard validate   → format compliance + quality scoring
  skill-guard secure     → scan for dangerous patterns  
  skill-guard conflict   → detect trigger overlap with existing skills
  skill-guard test       → inject into staging agent, run evals [requires --agent-url]
  skill-guard check      → run all four as a single gate

ONGOING (post-merge, scheduled):
  skill-guard monitor    → re-run evals, detect drift, manage lifecycle
  skill-guard catalog    → searchable registry of approved skills

Quick Start

pip install skill-guard

# Initialize in your skills repo
skill-guard init

# Validate a skill
skill-guard validate ./skills/my-skill/

# Check for security issues
skill-guard secure ./skills/my-skill/

# Check for conflicts with existing skills
skill-guard conflict ./skills/my-skill/ --against ./skills/

# Run the full gate (validate + secure + conflict)
skill-guard check ./skills/my-skill/ --against ./skills/

Example Output

$ skill-guard validate ./skills/my-skill/

 skill-guard validate — my-skill
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Check                     ┃ Result                                           ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ skill_md_exists           │ ✅ SKILL.md found                                │
│ valid_yaml_frontmatter    │ ✅ Valid YAML frontmatter                        │
│ name_field_present        │ ✅ name: my-skill                                │
│ description_field_present │ ✅ description field present                     │
│ directory_name_matches    │ ✅ Directory name matches skill name             │
│ description_trigger_hint  │ ✅ Description contains trigger hint ('Use when')│
│ no_broken_body_paths      │ ✅ No broken relative paths in SKILL.md body     │
│ evals_directory_exists    │ ⚠️ No evals/ directory found                     │
│                           │ → Create evals/config.yaml with test cases       │
│ metadata_has_author       │ ✅ author: my-team                               │
│ metadata_has_version      │ ✅ version: 1.0                                  │
└───────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Score: 97/100 | Grade: A | Blockers: 0 | Warnings: 1

Installation

Prerequisites

Requirement	Version	Notes
Python	3.11+	Required. 3.12 and 3.13 tested.
pip	any recent	Bundled with Python
typer	≥0.13.0	Installed automatically
git	any	Required only if using skill-guard test or skill-guard monitor with a repo
Agent endpoint	—	Required only for skill-guard test (OpenAI-compatible API)

Note: skill-guard validate, secure, conflict, init, catalog, and check work fully offline — no agent or API key needed.

Installation

# Core (static analysis — no agent required)
pip install skill-guard

# With embedding-based conflict detection (sentence-transformers)
pip install skill-guard[embeddings]

Documentation

• Getting Started
• End-to-End Integration Guide ← start here for real agent setup
• Writing Evals
• Hook Scripts
• CI/CD Integration
• Configuration Reference

What skill-guard Does NOT Do

• Does not replace Anthropic's skill-creator for writing skills
• Does not host or serve skills — skills live in your repo
• Does not modify skills — it reports issues, authors fix them
• Does not require a database or server — the catalog is a YAML file in your repo

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. We welcome contributions of all kinds.

License

Apache 2.0. See LICENSE.