Skills

Commands for managing Everscribe's Claude Code skills. Today there's one skill. setup, the Claude setup skill that adds Everscribe to your codebase. Future skills (rotation, key audit, etc.) will surface through the same commands.

Commands

Command What it does
es skills list [--format table|json|yaml] List skills published on everscribe.io.
es skills describe <name> [--format markdown|json|yaml] Show one skill's metadata + raw SKILL.md body without installing.
es skills download <name> [--dir <path>] [--force] Download a skill's SKILL.md into your Claude Code skills directory.

es skills is a distribution helper. It fetches public manifests from everscribe.io/manifests/ and writes the skill to disk. It doesn't authenticate, and it doesn't run the skill itself; Claude Code does that on its next startup once the file is in place.

List

es skills list

Renders a table of every skill in the catalog with its current published version:

NAME    VERSION   DESCRIPTION
setup   1.0.0     Set up Everscribe in your codebase

--format json and --format yaml emit the bare array (no envelope). Same convention as es projects list, so jq / yq pipelines work without unwrapping.

Describe

es skills describe setup

Prints the skill's metadata block followed by its raw SKILL.md body. Useful for previewing what download would actually write:

Name:        setup
Version:     1.0.0
Description: Set up Everscribe in your codebase
Skill dir:   everscribe-setup
Source:      https://everscribe.io/manifests/setup.md

---

# Everscribe setup
...

The default format is markdown because YAML-encoded markdown is hard to scan; --format json and --format yaml emit a structured document with the body included as a string field if you want to pipe the output:

es skills describe setup --format json | jq '.body'
es skills describe setup --format yaml > setup-preview.yaml

describe errors if the named skill isn't in the catalog (try \es skills list``) and prints the API error verbatim on network or 5xx failures.

Download

es skills download setup

Fetches the skill body and writes it to:

~/.claude/skills/<claude-code-skill-name>/SKILL.md

For setup that resolves to ~/.claude/skills/everscribe-setup/SKILL.md. Restart Claude Code, then invoke /everscribe-setup in any repo you want to instrument.

The command refuses to overwrite an existing SKILL.md without --force:

es skills download setup --force

--force is also the standard upgrade path. When we ship a new version of the skill, re-run with --force to overwrite the local copy. Restart Claude Code afterward; it caches skill content on startup.

Custom destination

If your Claude Code skills root lives somewhere other than ~/.claude/skills (uncommon, but happens on shared-machine setups or when running Claude Code under a non-default $HOME), override with --dir:

es skills download setup --dir /opt/team/claude-skills

Or via the EVERSCRIBE_CLAUDE_SKILLS_DIR environment variable. Precedence is --dir first, then env, then the default.

What's next