taken

"A very particular set of skills, acquired over a very long career."

taken is a personal dotfile-style CLI for managing AI agent skills (SKILL.md files). Think chezmoi, but for agent skills — your skills live in ~/.taken/, are git-backed, and can be linked into any project on demand.

Fully compatible with the skills.sh ecosystem (Claude Code, Cursor, OpenAI Codex, and 40+ agents).

Install

uv tool install taken-cli

pipx install taken-cli

Quick Start

1. Initialize

taken init

Sets up ~/.taken/, prompts for your namespace, creates config and registry.

2. Create a personal skill

taken add my-skill

Scaffolds ~/.taken/skills/<you>/my-skill/SKILL.md and opens it in your editor.

3. Adopt an existing skill from a project

taken add ./agents/my-skill/

Copies the skill folder into ~/.taken/ and registers it, detecting provenance from skills.sh lock files automatically.

4. Install a skill from GitHub

taken install vercel-labs/agent-skills
taken install vercel-labs/agent-skills/react-best-practices
taken install https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-skills

Interactive fuzzy picker when multiple skills are found. Use --skill to install specific ones non-interactively, --ref to pin to a branch/tag/SHA, --pin to lock the version.

5. Use a skill in a project

taken use

Fuzzy-picks from your registry and copies the skill into .agents/skills/ in the current project. Records state in .taken.yaml (committed to git — no taken dependency needed for teammates).

6. Push edits back to registry

taken save

If you refined a skill while working in a project, save promotes those edits back to ~/.taken/ so they propagate to future projects.

7. Update project skills

taken update

Re-copies the latest registry version into the project. Warns before overwriting if local edits are detected.

Commands

How It Works

Skills live in ~/.taken/skills/<namespace>/<skill-name>/. The registry at ~/.taken/registry.yaml is the single source of truth for provenance — tracking whether a skill was created personally, adopted from a project, or installed from GitHub.

When you run taken use, the skill is copied (never symlinked) into .agents/skills/ and tracked in .taken.yaml at the project root. This file is committed to git, making the project self-contained — teammates don't need taken installed to use the skills.

Storage Layout

~/.taken/
  config.yaml       # username, preferences
  registry.yaml     # all skills + metadata
  skills/
    you/
      my-skill/
        SKILL.md
    vercel-labs/
      react-best-practices/
        SKILL.md