Andrew Brown’s USDA Skills (aigb-skills-usda)

aigb-skills-usda is Andrew Brown’s public repository of agent skills curated for USDA workflows, geospatial computing, and software engineering. It packages planning, code review, investigative research, and developer tooling into a reproducible npm package and lockfile-driven catalog.

What is here

• A ready-to-use npm package with the skills CLI (npx --no-install skills after npm link from a checkout).
• Curated skill catalog defined in catalog/skills.lock.json
• Materialized and linkable skills in skills/.
• Permissive MIT License at the repository root, with explicit third-party attribution external skills.
• Agent and repo conventions in AGENTS.md.

Quick Start (Installing Skills)

From a checkout containing the packaged skills/ directory, install the local package link first, then use npx to invoke its CLI; Node.js 18 or newer is required:

npm link
npx --no-install skills install --target ~/.agents/skills

This copies packaged skills and never fetches skill sources. npm link makes this checkout’s package available to npx; --no-install prevents npx from downloading an unrelated registry package. The install command requires source and target to be separate, non-overlapping directories. Existing same-named skills in the destination are left untouched: by default, installation refuses the conflicting install; pass --force to replace the matching destination skills.

Or using make:

make help
make install
make install-skills
make test

make install installs npm dependencies. make install-skills invokes the checked-in CLI directly and copies skills into ~/.agents/skills; if any same-named skills already exist, it refuses. To explicitly replace matching skills through Make, use make install-skills -- --force. make test is the broader maintainer smoke suite and can require sibling source checkouts; it is not needed to install packaged skills.

To install selected skills, pass a comma-separated list or use the singular shorthand:

make install-skills SKILLS=plan-first,dr-lexus
make install-skill SKILL=plan-first
make install-skill SKILL=plan-first -- --force
make install-skills-force SKILLS=plan-first,dr-lexus

The first two forms refuse conflicting skills by default. install-skills-force always replaces matching skills and accepts the optional SKILLS filter.

CI Validation vs. Maintainer Sync

CI validates the packaged skills/ directory with:

npm run validate:skills -- --report .scratch/skills-report.json

This check uses only files shipped in this repository. It does not clone or sync upstream repositories, access private repositories, or require sibling checkouts.

The existing npm test smoke suite also exercises maintainer synchronization paths and may require local upstream source checkouts. Run it locally when working on skills sync; it is not the packaged-only CI contract.