skill-atlas

Skill Atlas

A third tier for Claude Code skills — dormant, zero tokens, still findable. Search a graph of your collection instead of preloading it.

53 skills, 6 kept enabled: 2,544 → 338 tokens per session (−86.7%). The other 47 cost nothing until asked for.

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⚡ Install

claude plugin marketplace add danielLublinsky/Skill-Atlas
claude plugin install skill-atlas@skill-atlas

Python 3 only — no dependencies, no network (d3 is vendored).

Update. New versions arrive on their own — Claude Code refreshes marketplaces periodically and picks up the new version, applying it on the next restart. To pull one immediately:

claude plugin marketplace update skill-atlas
claude plugin update skill-atlas@skill-atlas

Then restart Claude Code — the update is staged until you do.

git clone https://github.com/danielLublinsky/Skill-Atlas.git
claude plugin marketplace add ./Skill-Atlas
claude plugin install skill-atlas@skill-atlas

▶️ Run

Then open ./.claude/skill-atlas/atlas.html in a browser, and just ask for a task — the search runs itself, names the skill it picked in one line, and gets on with the work.

make build    # graph.json + catalog/ from your live manifests
make render   # atlas.html
make check    # CI gate: exit 1 on any broken reference or dangling mention
make test     # unit suite against fixtures — never touches the real ~/.claude
make release  # bump both manifests, validate, test — never commits or pushes

The plugin cache is keyed by version, so a push without a bump ships no code to anyone already installed. make release (or BUMP=minor, VERSION=1.0.0) is what makes a change land.

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🎯 The problem

Claude Code injects every enabled skill's description into every session — ~48 tokens each. At 100+ skills that's thousands of tokens you pay for constantly, and near-duplicates quietly compete for the model's attention.

Disabling fixes the cost and loses the skill. So Skill Atlas adds a tier in between:

A searchable skill is dormant — its description never enters your context, but it stays discoverable on demand. All that advertises the whole dormant tier is one ~50-token line at session start.

🔍 Search reads two files, not the catalog

flowchart LR
    A(["🧭 a task arrives<br/><i>“resolve this merge conflict”</i>"])

    subgraph R1["1️⃣ read the index · ~1.6k tok"]
        I["<b>_index.md</b> — 14 lines<br/><i>name · count · what it covers · member tokens</i>"]
    end

    subgraph R2["2️⃣ read one shard · ~0.6k tok"]
        S["<b>version-control.md</b><br/>using-git-worktrees<br/>resolving-merge-conflicts ← hit"]
    end

    X["the other 13 shards<br/><i>~10k tok · never opened</i>"]

    A --> I
    I -- "pick ONE category" --> S
    I -. skipped .-> X
    S --> E["🟢 <b>enabled</b><br/><i>invoke natively</i>"]
    S --> F["🟣 <b>searchable</b><br/><i>read its path,<br/>follow as instructions</i>"]

    classDef file stroke:#8a8578,stroke-width:1.5px
    classDef ghost fill:transparent,stroke:#8a8578,stroke-width:1.5px
    classDef hit fill:#1baf7a26,stroke:#1baf7a,stroke-width:2px
    classDef dormant fill:#8a5cd626,stroke:#8a5cd6,stroke-width:2px
    classDef muted fill:transparent,stroke:#8a8578,stroke-width:1px,stroke-dasharray:4 3
    class I,S file
    class A ghost
    class E hit
    class F dormant
    class X muted
    style R1 fill:#3987e514,stroke:#3987e5,stroke-width:1.5px
    style R2 fill:#3987e514,stroke:#3987e5,stroke-width:1.5px

A search costs ~2.4k tokens — the index (1.6k), one shard (~0.6k) and the search skill itself (0.4k) — and you pay it only when a search happens. The alternative it replaces is every dormant description sitting in context from session start, billed whether you search or not. The arbitrage is real when searches are occasional; it is not free, and the numbers above are measured rather than estimated.

One shard is the norm. A second is opened only when the entry you found lists a category you haven't read — the catalog pointing, not the model guessing — and never a third. Counts overlap on purpose, so the pick doesn't have to land on the right bucket, only a right one. Tier-off skills are excluded when shards are written, so a disabled plugin can never return through a side door. The result is announced in one line before the work continues: search is a lookup inside a task, not a deliverable.

The model categorizes once. The first run drafts 8–12 categories named for user-intent task shapes, not products, then freezes the taxonomy. Later runs only file new skills and re-confirm the ones whose description changed — each assignment carries a hash of the description it was made against.

🕸️ The graph

Discovery is manifest-driven — installed_plugins.json → each plugin.json → settings — so marketplace catalogues and stale cached versions never pollute the picture. (The naive "every directory with a SKILL.md" count over-counts by ~60% on a real machine: build_graph.py --naive-count.)

Skills are nodes. The edges are the interesting part:

Mention matching is deliberately strict — only backticked, skills/<name>, or unambiguous hyphenated names, code fences stripped first. Loose matching produced 91 edges on a 41-skill collection, almost all of them ordinary English words. You also get duplicate names, orphans, and an exit code to gate CI on.

atlas.html is self-contained and opens from file:// with zero network requests: scope (origin, state, breakage in red) and categories (hub-and-spoke — solid edge to the home category, dashed to the rest; search cat:<name> to isolate).

🛠️ Building and debugging skills

• What's really registered — discovery is manifest-driven, so unregistered copies and stale plugin caches surface as their own nodes instead of quietly counting.
• Broken bundles — a references edge whose file isn't on disk draws red, so a typo'd references/foo.md is visible without opening anything.
• Why it didn't trigger — tier is the node's fill (enabled · searchable · disabled), and duplicate names are called out in the footer with both nodes drawn.
• Read it in place — pin any skill or bundled file and hit open markdown to read the source in a popup without leaving the graph.

📚 Docs

docs/ — component guide, numbered 1–9