Terma (གཏེར་མ)

A highly-opinionated library of philosophy and process for developing software with LLMs.

Works with any agent that reads SKILL.md — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Zed, Copilot and others — and installs as a Claude Code plugin marketplace. Both read the same files.

Installation

Any agent — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Zed, Copilot and others, via the skills CLI:

npx skills add bfollington/terma

Add -s convergent-planning,surface-forks to take only some, or -l to list what’s there without installing.

For every project on the machine rather than the current one, install globally:

npx skills add bfollington/terma -g --skill '*' --agent '*' -y

Skills land in ~/.agents/skills/ — that is the real content, and the directory to back up or edit. How each agent picks them up from there varies: some get a symlink farm of their own (~/.claude/skills/ is symlinks pointing back into .agents), while others — Codex among them — read ~/.agents/skills/ directly and get no per-agent directory at all. An empty ~/.codex/skills/ is not a failed install.

Update later with npx skills update -g. The repo is the source, so local edits under ~/.agents/skills/ are overwritten on the next update — change plugins/ and push instead.

Claude Code, as a plugin marketplace:

/plugin marketplace add 
/plugin install terma@terma
/plugin install terma@tsal

Or during development:

claude --plugin-dir ./plugins/terma --plugin-dir ./plugins/tsal

Both work off the same files — the skills CLI reads .claude-plugin/marketplace.json to find the plugin roots, so there is one source of truth and no duplication.

Pick one for Claude Code rather than running both: the plugin presents skills as terma:surface-forks and a global install presents the same skill as surface-forks, so together they show up twice. The one thing only the plugin carries is plugins/terma/agents/ — the skills CLI installs skills, not subagents, so a global install leaves those 6 behind. Copy them to ~/.claude/agents/ if you want them.

What’s in it

Skills, not procedures. Each one is an index card of crystallized wisdom meant to change how a situation is seen before anything is done — dense enough to be worth loading, narrow enough to compose with the others. Most fire on their own when the situation calls for them.

Thinking about change

Thinking about code

Getting oriented, and everything else

plan routes to whichever of the planning skills the moment calls for.

Patterns

• feature dev: orient, plan, surface-forks, implement, code-review
• research: orient, research
• something is broken: investigate-debug
• a new idea: ideate, idea-to-prototype

Structure

.claude-plugin/marketplace.json   # Marketplace manifest
plugins/terma/                    # Process & philosophy plugin
  .claude-plugin/plugin.json      # Plugin manifest
  agents/                         # Subagent definitions
  skills/                         # One directory per skill, each a self-contained SKILL.md
plugins/tsal/                     # Domain-specific skills plugin
  .claude-plugin/plugin.json      # Plugin manifest
  skills/                         # Domain skills (bevy, godot, strudel, etc.)

Customizing

Edit anything under plugins/terma/ or plugins/tsal/. Each skill is self-contained — there are no shared includes to chase, so a skill can be rewritten or deleted without touching anything else. authoring-skills describes what a good one looks like if you want to add your own.

CANDIDATES.md lists skills worth writing and the reasoning for each, deliberately unwritten until real friction calls for them.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.