Skilldex: A Package Manager and Registry for Agent Skill Packages with Hierarchical Scope-Based Distribution

TL;DR

Skilldex is an open-source package manager and registry for agent skill packages that ensures format conformance and promotes behavioral coherence among related skills.

Contribution

It introduces a compiler-style format scoring system and a skillset abstraction to improve skill package quality and coherence.

Findings

Implemented as a TypeScript CLI with a registry backend.

Provides format conformance diagnostics and cross-skill coherence enforcement.

Open-source system with hierarchical scope and community registry.

Abstract

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly extended at runtime via skill packages, structured natural-language instruction bundles loaded from a well-known directory. Community install tooling and registries exist, but two gaps persist: no public tool scores skill packages against Anthropic's published format specification, and no mechanism bundles related skills with the shared context they need to remain mutually coherent. We present Skilldex, a package manager and registry for agent skill packages addressing both gaps. The two novel contributions are: (1) compiler-style format conformance scoring against Anthropic's skill specification, producing line-level diagnostics on description specificity, frontmatter validity, and structural adherence; and (2) the skillset abstraction, a bundled collection of related skills with shared assets (vocabulary files, templates, reference documents) that enforce cross-skill behavioral coherence. Skilldex also provides supporting infrastructure: a three-tier hierarchical scope system, a human-in-the-loop agent suggestion loop, a metadata-only community registry, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. The system is implemented as a TypeScript CLI (skillpm / spm) with a Hono/Supabase registry backend, and is open-source.