skillscout

Skillscout is a Mac app for the skills your coding agents load. It finds every skill on your Mac, shows which agents can see each one, and counts how often you use them.

It knows 8 agents: Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Droid, Pi and Amp. Each one reads skills from its own folders, and some also read the folders of the others. So a skill you wrote for Claude Code can load in Cursor but not in Codex. Skillscout maps all of it, and adds a skill to the agents that miss it with one click.

It also reads your chats. It counts a use every time an agent loads a skill, and it looks for requests you keep typing, so you can turn them into new skills.

Read the announcement and watch the 1-minute demo on my blog: I built Skillscout, a Mac app for the skills your coding agents load.

Download

Get Skillscout-1.3.0.zip from the latest release, unzip it, and drag Skillscout to your Applications folder. It runs on macOS 15 Sequoia or later, on Apple silicon and Intel Macs.

Opening it the first time

Skillscout isn't signed with an Apple Developer ID or notarized by Apple. So the first time you open it, macOS says it "could not verify Skillscout is free of malware". Click Done, then allow it in one of two ways.

In System Settings, open Privacy & Security and scroll down to the message about Skillscout. Click Open Anyway, confirm, and open the app again. The button shows up for about an hour after you try to open the app.

In Terminal, remove the quarantine flag macOS adds to downloaded files, then open the app:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Skillscout.app

The same command fixes a message saying Skillscout is damaged. You don't need to turn off Gatekeeper for either option.

On a work laptop you might not be able to install apps in /Applications. You can keep Skillscout in the Applications folder inside your home folder, and run the command on ~/Applications/Skillscout.app. If your company blocks apps that aren't notarized, ask your IT team.

Updates

Once a day, Skillscout asks GitHub whether there's a newer version. When there is, it shows what's new, and Install and Relaunch puts it in place of the old one. Skillscout → Check for Updates… checks right away. The skillscout command lives inside the app, so it updates too.

To turn off the daily check, run this in Terminal:

defaults write com.flaviocopes.skillscout AppUpdaterAutomaticChecks -bool false

Features

• Every skill from your agents in one list, with a row of icons showing which agents load it
• Missing somewhere lists the skills at least one of your agents can't see
• Add to links the skill folder into another agent's skills folder, so every agent loads the same file
• Uninstall moves a skill to the Trash, from all your skills folders or from one of them
• Edit changes a skill's SKILL.md right in the app, in every copy that has the same text
• Rename gives a skill a new name in its folders, its links and its SKILL.md, and keeps its usage
• Similar skills pairs the skills that read alike, and Merge with AI turns two of them into one
• Unused lists the skills no chat touched in the last 60 days
• Usage for each skill: how many chats, from which agents, in which projects, and when you last used it
• The skills you created last come first, and you can sort by name or by use instead
• Search by name or description with ⌘F
• Explain with AI asks Claude Code or Codex what a skill does, when the agent uses it, and what it needs to work
• Suggestions finds the tasks you keep asking for and drafts a SKILL.md for each one
• Plugin and built-in skills from Cursor, Claude Code and Codex, with a filter in the toolbar to show your skills, the plugin ones, the built-in ones, or all of them
• Every copy of a skill on disk, with a warning when two copies have different content
• The list and the counts update while you work, as skills and chats change on disk
• A skillscout command for your terminal that reads the same data
• Updates from inside the app: it checks GitHub once a day, and Install and Relaunch puts the new version in place
• Light and dark appearance following the macOS setting

The agents it knows

Every agent has its own skills folder, and its own place for chats:

Some folders are read by more than one agent. ~/.agents/skills is a shared folder that Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Droid and Pi all load. Cursor and OpenCode also load ~/.claude/skills, and Cursor loads ~/.codex/skills too. Claude Code and Amp only read their own folders.

Skillscout knows these rules, so for every skill it tells you which agents load it and from which folder.

It lists your own skills first. Pick Plugin skills, Built-in skills or All skills in the toolbar to see the plugin skills from ~/.cursor/plugins, ~/.claude/plugins/cache and ~/.codex/plugins/cache, and the built-in skills of Cursor and Codex.

Skillscout turns on the agents it finds on your Mac. You can turn any of them off in Settings, and Skillscout stops showing its skills and reading its chats.

Adding a skill to more agents

Pick a skill, and the Available in section lists all 8 agents. Agents that load it show the folder it comes from. The others get an Add to button.

Adding a skill creates a symbolic link to the skill folder inside that agent's skills folder. The agents all load the same SKILL.md, so when you edit it, every one of them gets the change.

Plugin skills get copied instead of linked, because a plugin update replaces its folders.

Removing a skill

Select a skill and click the Trash button in the toolbar, or Uninstall this skill under Where it lives. You can also right-click it in the list, or press Delete. Skillscout moves every copy in your skills folders to the Trash, links included, so you can put it back from there.

To take a skill away from some agents only, click Remove next to one of its folders. If other folders link to that one, the links go too, since they'd point to nothing. When you remove a link, the folder it points to stays.

Before anything moves, Skillscout tells you which agents will stop loading the skill.

Plugin and built-in skills stay where they are. Their agents manage them, so uninstall the plugin to remove its skills.

Editing a skill

Select a skill and click the edit button in the toolbar, or Edit above its SKILL.md. The editor keeps your quotes straight and your -- as two hyphens, so the commands in a skill still run.

Skillscout saves the text to every copy of the skill that had the same text. A copy with different text stays as it is, and so does a plugin copy. If an agent changes the SKILL.md while you're editing it, Skillscout tells you before it saves over that change.

The name in the frontmatter stays as it is, since a new name also means new folders. Use Rename for that. Open in editor opens the file in your usual Markdown editor instead.

Renaming a skill

Select a skill and click the rename button in the toolbar, or Rename… under Where it lives. Names use lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens, like release-notes.

Skillscout renames the skill's folders in your skills folders, creates its links again under the new name, and changes the name in its SKILL.md. A folder outside your skills folders, like a repo of skills your links point to, keeps its folder name. A plugin copy keeps the old name too.

Chats that used the old name keep counting for the skill.

Merging similar skills

After a while, you end up with two skills that do almost the same job. Similar skills in the sidebar lists the pairs that read alike, and the words they share.

Skillscout compares the words in each skill's name, description and SKILL.md, and rare words count more than common ones. It runs on your Mac, without AI, and it only pairs your own skills, not plugin or built-in ones.

Pick a pair to see the two skills side by side. Choose the name to keep and click Merge with AI. Claude Code or Codex writes one SKILL.md from both, and you can edit it before anything changes. When you click Merge into, Skillscout:

• writes the new SKILL.md into the kept skill's folder, and moves the old one to the Trash
• copies over the other skill's extra files, like templates and references, unless the kept skill has one at the same path
• moves the other skill to the Trash
• links the kept skill into the other one's folders, so the agents that loaded the other skill load the kept one

Chats that used the other skill count for the kept one from then on.

If two skills look alike but do different jobs, click They're different skills, and Skillscout won't p