vscode-agent-skill-ninja

What the extension does

Agent Skills Ninja is a Visual Studio Code extension that helps developers find, install, and organize agent skills for several AI coding tools at once. It supports GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and Cline, and it works across four skill scopes: the workspace, the user or global location, read only installed extensions, and optional built in skills. The extension auto detects which AI tools are present in a workspace and picks a sensible output format, while still allowing a manual override in settings. It writes the skill list into the right instruction file for each tool, choosing between AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, copilot-instructions.md, Cursor rules, Windsurf rules, and Cline rules. A preset index ships with skills from official, curated, and community sources, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, GitHub, and Microsoft collections. The goal is to keep a single, accurate catalog of skills that the agent frameworks can read, so that a skill written on disk is actually registered and visible to the assistant that needs it. The README frames this as solving the silent failure where a SKILL.md exists locally but is never referenced by the project's plugin manifest. The extension shows star counts and organization badges in search results, and it can install, preview, or favorite a skill directly from the results list without leaving the panel.

Search, install, and management

The sidebar exposes installed skills grouped by root, a user and global view, and a remote skills browser sorted from official to curated to community sources. Search works both locally and against GitHub, with multi keyword scoring by name, path, and description, and it runs parallel fetches with up to 50 concurrent requests plus a fallback that retries with fewer keywords. Double clicking a remote row installs it into the workspace skill root, and there is an optional single click install toggle. Each writable root shows inline actions to regenerate skill output or reinstall remote skills, and the tree can explain a skill's state, including its registration source and instruction target. The extension also extracts a 'When to Use' column from each SKILL.md, lets you edit descriptions, and offers batch reinstall and partial failure warnings that report succeeded and failed counts. Output formats include a lightweight ref mode that keeps only a routing prompt and a linked catalog, plus full, compact, and legacy table modes. MCP tools are exposed in Agent Mode, giving ten commands such as searchSkills, installSkill, and updateSkillIndex, with trust badges that mark official, curated, or community sources so you can judge provenance at a glance. It also exposes listSkills, uninstallSkill, and recommendSkills.

Copilot chat and output formats

Beyond the sidebar, Agent Skills Ninja adds GitHub Copilot Chat commands so you can work without leaving the chat panel. The supported slash commands are search, install, list, and recommend, and the extension can suggest project based skills from its index. The output that the extension maintains is tunable through settings, and the default ref format writes a small instruction block plus a separate catalog file at .github/skills/README.md, keeping the always loaded file light. Full and compact formats embed a table directly in the instruction file, while legacy writes a simple table without the priority prompt. For each workspace skill root, relative paths resolve from the workspace root, and for user or global skills they resolve from the instruction file directory so personal files stay portable. The extension ships a Japanese and English interface, a webview preview, and a favorites feature. A companion extension called Agent Resources Ninja manages skills together with agents, prompts, instructions, hooks, and MCP configuration. The project is released under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) as shown in the repository, which means commercial use is restricted by the non commercial clause of that license. The ref catalog format can be set to full, compact, or legacy, and the install target picker decides which location receives the generated list when several managed roots exist.

Editorial conclusion

Agent Skills Ninja is published under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and, at the time of writing, the repository recorded 25 stars and was last updated on 2026-08-24.