ydmitry/skill-finder

Maybe someone in your org already wrote a skill for this.
Your company keeps Claude Code skills in a few repos or plugin marketplaces, or you added a marketplace once and forgot what
is in it. You haven't read them all, and you won't install them all. But for the task in front of you, one may already
exist. skill-finder searches every skill on your machine (installed, disabled, or never installed but shipped inside a
marketplace Claude Code cloned) plus any skill repo you have cloned and listed in scripts/roots. It lists the skills that
contain the words Claude looks up, in their SKILL.md or in their reference files, each with its path and the line that
matched. Claude can then read the one that fits, or
you can copy it into a folder you start a fresh session in. It never edits settings.json; beyond the folder you clone, the
only change to your setup is the CLAUDE.md lines you add.
What the tests show: with the CLAUDE.md block, Sonnet runs the finder and opens skills it could not otherwise see (one in 44
of 50 runs, against none in 30 runs without the block; ten requests, the first turn only); Haiku, on the same requests, mostly
answered without running it. What they do not show: that the finished work is better. In my own sessions in the nine days after
I added the block, the finder ran in 6 of 26, and in 2 of them a skill it listed was invoked or its SKILL.md read afterwards.
The tests are under Does it work?.
Why not just enable them? Enable the plugins you know you need. Claude Code gives its skill list a budget of 1% of the
context window and, past that, drops the descriptions of the skills you invoke least, keeping their names; a 200-skill Haiku
test could not measure any harm from that.
The finder is for the skills you cannot enable without first finding them: in a marketplace you added but never installed, in
a team or public repo you cloned, or in a plugin you turned off.
The CLAUDE.md block below (about 220 tokens in every session) has Claude look the skills up before a task's first edit. A
lookup lists at most 10 skills whose SKILL.md holds the phrase (and up to 5 that hold it only in reference files), each with
its description and the line that matched: in my tests about 3,800 characters in the median, up to about 8,800. Claude can
read most skills from their files without enabling them; whether it then follows one as well as an enabled skill is not
measured.
Claude will not reach for the finder by itself, so it comes with a short instruction for your CLAUDE.md (below). It pays
off most for skills Claude cannot see; for skills Claude already lists, the tests found little gain, except for a second
need that shows only in the files (the optional Second lookups section below).
## What a lookup looks like
$ python3 scripts/find_skills.py --phrase "release notes" --only tests/fixtures/skills
phrase search: "release notes" in the SKILL.md and reference files of 18 skills on disk (a phrase starts a word: 'plan' matches 'planning', not 'airplane')
1 skill(s) contain it. Best first: the phrase in the name, then in the description, then how often it occurs.
1. release-notes [folder skill] tests/fixtures/skills/release-notes/SKILL.md