Claude Cowork Skills Toolkit

Streamline skill management in Cowork with five powerful commands.

Claude Cowork Skills Toolkit

Five commands for moving skills between GitHub, your Cowork session, and your teammates.

Cowork is Anthropic's agentic AI system for knowledge work, with a built-in skill/plugin system. New Claude skills ship on GitHub all the time. This toolkit cuts the time between finding one and using it down to a single / command, even mid-session. Five commands: install from a GitHub URL, save iterated versions from a conversation, share installed skills with teammates as a .zip plugin, refresh against upstream, and auto-detect URLs pasted in chat.

The toolkit

  • /skills-load <github-url> — Browse any GitHub repo's skills, pick what you want, install as a one-click plugin.
  • Auto-detection — Paste a GitHub URL in chat and the toolkit offers to browse its skills.
  • /skills-save — Save the iterated-in-conversation version of loaded skills as a fresh plugin.
  • /skills-share — Package already-installed skills as a .zip to share with teammates.
  • /skills-update — Re-fetch each installed plugin's GitHub source, diff by SHA256, rebuild only what changed.

Example: loading skills from a GitHub repo

You:    /skills-load https://github.com/deanpeters/Product-Manager-Skills

Claude: Found 47 skills in deanpeters/Product-Manager-Skills:

        | #  | Skill                | Description                              |
        |----|----------------------|------------------------------------------|
        | 1  | discovery-process    | Run structured product discovery...      |
        | 2  | roadmap-planning     | Build quarterly roadmaps with deps...    |
        | 3  | competitive-analysis | Framework for competitive assessment...  |
        | ...                                                                     |

        Pick by number, name, keyword search, or "all".

You:    2, 3

Claude: `roadmap-planning` references `discovery-process` — including it.

        Plugin `product-manager-skills` ready — 3 skills (including 1 dependency).
        Click "Save plugin" on the plugin preview above.

Install

  1. Download skills-toolkit.zip from the latest release
  2. Upload it to Cowork: Customize → Personal Plugin (+) → Create plugin → Upload plugin

Or build from source:

python3 build.py
# Output: dist/skills-toolkit.zip

Commands

/skills-load <github-url> — Clones the repo, discovers all SKILL.md files, shows a numbered catalog. You pick; dependencies are resolved automatically (if skill A references skill B, both get included). Everything is packaged as a .plugin and presented with a one-click "Save plugin" button. Skills appear in your / menu immediately, mid-session. No restart.

Auto-detection — Paste a GitHub URL in chat and the toolkit recognizes it, offering to browse available skills.

/skills-save — After iterating on loaded skills in conversation, save the CURRENT versions as a fresh plugin. Captures the in-context state (not GitHub's version), preserving any edits, additions, or refinements made during the conversation. Saves under a new name (default iterated-<repo>) so the original plugin stays untouched.

/skills-share — Export skills already in your session as a downloadable .zip. Save it wherever you want (Desktop, Documents, Slack) and share. For skills you already have — use /skills-load for new skills from GitHub.

/skills-update — Refresh plugins previously installed by this toolkit from their GitHub sources. Discovers them via the skills-toolkit keyword marker embedded in each plugin's plugin.json, diffs each skill by SHA256, and rebuilds only the plugins with actual upstream changes. Save plugin replaces the installed version in place. Works across session restarts — no need to re-run /skills-load.

How it works

Cowork runs a Linux VM. Bash commands execute inside the VM (isolated from the host). The Write tool bridges to the host filesystem. mcp__cowork__present_files bridges the VM to the desktop UI.

The load flow:

  1. Bash clones the GitHub repo inside the VM
  2. discover-skills.sh finds all SKILL.md files, extracts name/description from YAML frontmatter, outputs JSON
  3. User picks skills from the catalog
  4. Dependency scanner reads each selected skill's body, finds references to other skills, auto-includes them
  5. Python (via Bash) builds a .plugin ZIP with .claude-plugin/plugin.json + skills/*/SKILL.md
  6. mcp__cowork__present_files presents the ZIP to the Cowork desktop UI
  7. Cowork renders a rich preview with a "Save plugin" button
  8. Click → skills install through Anthropic's backend → appear in / menu immediately
  9. Skills are also injected into the conversation context as a parallel fallback

Every plugin this toolkit builds embeds "skills-toolkit" in its keywords array. That marker is how /skills-update later finds them for refreshing.

Tradeoffs

Unified .plugin vs individual .skill files. A single .plugin gives one "Save plugin" button that installs everything as a named package. Downside: uninstalling removes the whole plugin, not individual skills. We chose this because the common case is loading a set of related skills, and one click beats five.

Auto-resolving dependencies. Skills often reference each other — a roadmap skill may depend on a discovery-process skill. We auto-include dependencies and tell the user why. This sometimes pulls in skills you didn't ask for, but a broken skill is worse than an extra one.

License

MIT