Skills

Commands for managing Everscribe's Claude Code skills. Today there's one skill — setup, the BYOK alternative to the hosted auto-instrument flow. 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