This page explains why I implemented Skills Primer, a CLI tool that enables skills integration in coding agents that lack native skills support.
Why I implemented skills-primer
Most major agents (Claude Code, Codex, others) support Agent Skills natively. But some agents do not, by choice or because they are early-stage, and I use one of them: Zerostack does not support skills by design. While I accept this premise and find it interesting to explore, over the past half year I have built a collection of skills as a primary means of sharing and reusing functionality across different coding agents. I did not want to give that up immediately, so I investigated what would be needed to achieve this.
So I built a project to reuse my skills library in this situation. It seemed to be a fun, small, focused project where I could build a CLI tool to integrate functionality into a coding agent. It was also an exercise in AI-assisted engineering in which I feed back experience into improving my agent skills and tooling.
Implementation proved possible through prompting alone. There was no need to write agent-specific code. The project could be a narrowly scoped CLI tool, one of my favourite areas for refining AI-assisted development.
Writing the CLI required me to read the spec and implement discovery, parsing, deduplication, and skills catalogue generation. This was also an opportunity to understand how Agent Skills work under the hood.
This was also an exercise in "AI-targeted" CLI design. There are two main ways to expose functionality to a coding agent: a CLI tool or an MCP server. I prefer CLI tools, and this was an opportunity to build one. I also drew inspiration from the Beads project's design: a command that generates its own usage instructions for the LLM. Instead of relying on an LLM to invoke help, it primes the LLM directly with Beads usage instructions. This design seemed a perfect fit for skills integration I was aiming to build.
While I do use Zerostack locally, it is very new and still in development. If you're looking for a minimal coding agent, I would currently recommend Pi instead. skills-primer was developed mainly with Pi, with occasional use of Codex (for GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.5 planning and review support) and Zerostack (for focused narrow tasks).
For the full implementation, including discovery, parsing, deduplication, and catalogue generation, see the repo. For other posts on this blog related to skills-primer go here.