skills-but-for-dev

Intelligent technology stack and open-source curator for AI agents (Cursor, Antigravity, and MCP-compatible environments).

skills-but-for-dev is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and agent skill that recommends fresh, healthy, and license-compliant GitHub repositories and Hugging Face models/Spaces before you start writing code.

⚡ The Problem: Knowledge Cutoff & Dead Repositories

When coding assistants (Cursor, Antigravity, Claude Code) are asked to "Build an AI meeting assistant that takes notes", they often generate code from 2-year-old libraries stored in their training data. Meanwhile:

• Outdated repos with 30,000 stars might be completely abandoned.
• State-of-the-art voice and speech models released last week on Hugging Face remain invisible.
• High-star repos with non-commercial (CC-BY-NC) or strong copyleft (GPL) licenses create legal hazards for startups.

skills-but-for-dev eliminates this blind spot.

🛠️ Features

• Dual-Bucket Search: Catches established leaders (stars:>500) alongside rising breakout projects (stars:75..3500, pushed within 30 days) without cannibalization.
• Real-Time Star Velocity: Computes 4-week moving average and acceleration (v4 / v12) using the official GitHub star history API in a single request.
• Smart VRAM Estimator: Accurate minimum VRAM baseline calculation across .safetensors, sharded model files, diffusers components, and distinct GGUF quantizations (Q4_K_M, Q8_0).
• Safety & Anti-Injection Sanitization: Strips HTML comments, hidden zero-width tags, and giant YAML frontmatter blocks before injecting curated context into your IDE.
• Zero LLM Overhead: The MCP server is 100% deterministic, free, and runs locally with an asynchronous SQLite WAL cache. Reasoning and query decomposition are performed natively by your IDE model via SKILL.md.

🚀 Quickstart

1. Requirements

• Python 3.11+
• (Optional but recommended) GITHUB_TOKEN for higher GitHub API rate limits.

2. Run with Zero Installation (uvx)

You can launch skills-but-for-dev directly in any MCP-compatible environment without cloning or managing virtual environments:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "skills-but-for-dev": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["skills-but-for-dev"],
      "env": {
        "GITHUB_TOKEN": "your_github_pat_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

3. Configure in Antigravity or Cursor (Local Development)

Antigravity (mcp_config.json)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "skills-but-for-dev": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["-m", "skills_but_for_dev.server"],
      "env": {
        "GITHUB_TOKEN": "your_github_pat_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Cursor (.cursor/mcp.json)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "skills-but-for-dev": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["-m", "skills_but_for_dev.server"],
      "env": {
        "GITHUB_TOKEN": "your_github_pat_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

4. CLI Diagnostics

You can inspect server health, token configuration, and cache paths directly from the terminal:

# Check version
skills-but-for-dev --version

# Ping and inspect active token/cache status
skills-but-for-dev ping

📖 Architecture & Design

See ARCHITECTURE.md for full architectural specifications, mathematical formulas, and rate-limit budgets.

📄 License

Apache-2.0