YLD Skills

Shared skills for AI coding agents, maintained for everyone at YLD.

What this is

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file in it. The file tells an agent how to do one kind of task well, such as running a release or writing a status update in the way we expect. When the agent sees a matching request it loads the instructions and follows them. A skill can also carry scripts, templates and reference documents that the agent reads only when it needs them.

This repository holds the skills specific to how YLD works, the ones we want every YLD engineer to have. Keeping them in one place means a fix lands once and everyone picks it up on their next pull, instead of each person maintaining their own copy.

The folders follow the open Agent Skills format, so they work in Claude Code and in any other tool that supports it.

How the skills are organised

Skills are grouped into one plugin per team, so a team’s skills can be installed together. Each plugin lives in plugins// and holds its skills in plugins//skills//SKILL.md. The list of plugins is in .claude-plugin/marketplace.json.

Every skill is also a plugin of its own, so people can add one skill without the rest of its team’s plugin. These single-skill plugins live in plugins//, and their skills/ folder is a copy of the skill from its team plugin. Claude’s organisation sync does not follow symlinks, so it has to be a real copy. The team plugin’s version is the source: edit only that one, then run mise run singles to refresh the copies. CI fails when a copy is out of date. Add either the team plugin or the single skill, not both, or the skill will load twice.

Using the skills

As plugins in Claude Code

Add this repository as a plugin marketplace once, then install the plugins you want. Each plugin brings all of its team’s skills:

/plugin marketplace add yldio/skills
/plugin install yld-design@yld-skills

Skills from a plugin are called as /:, for example /yld-design:eow-summary. /plugin marketplace update yld-skills picks up changes.

With the skills CLI