Put all your skills in one place | sx blog

If your organization uses coding agents heavily, you’ve probably bumped into various annoyances around managing assets like skills, tools and rules at scale. We built sx to try and address that.

Three things we wanted to fix

Skills live in multiple locations and often aren’t synced.<br>Repo-specific skills are part of the repo, which is useful as it keeps them implicitly up to date. Global skills are just loose files sitting in your home folder though. They don’t get shared, updated or backed up.

Multiple repos cause skill duplication.<br>Say your team has a neat set of test writing conventions and you try to enforce them with a skill. Unless you work on a single product, that skill will end up in more than one repo. This means you now have multiple instances you need to manually keep track of.

People use different coding agents.<br>Many organizations let their devs pick AI tools based on individual preference. The result is you’re forced to1 add .claude, .cursor and .codex to support everyone, multiplying the mess I already mentioned.

What sx does about it

You put every skill in a single repository. There’s only one copy of each, along with configuration that defines where it should be applied (globally, per-repo, per-team or per-user).

The sx client on each person’s machine takes care of installing the right skills in the right places, and in the right format for whatever AI tool they happen to run. Whenever a skill changes, it auto-updates it in place.

Setting it up

First, install sx

# Either via Homebrew …<br>brew tap sleuth-io/tap<br>brew install sx

# … or via a shell script:<br>curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sleuth-io/sx/main/install.sh | bash

Then, scaffold that central repo I mentioned (we call it a git vault):

sx init --type git --repo-url git@github.com:yourorg/skills.git

If you’d rather just see what one looks like, sleuth-io/skills-repository is a real working example we use in our testing.

Next, upload your skills to that repo with the client and scope it:

# add a skill from a local skill folder and scope it to specific repos<br>sx add ./postgres-optimizations --repo git@github.com:yourorg/repo-one.git \<br>--repo git@github.com:yourorg/repo-two.git

Scopes define where a skill should be used: --org makes a skill available to everyone, --team activates it for a team of people, --repo and --path enable it in specific repos (or subpaths, if you’ve got monorepos), --user targets one person. That config lives in the git repo along with the skills, so you can easily modify everything right on the filesystem if you prefer that to the CLI tool.

Then everyone on the team installs the client and points it at the vault. From their side it’s basically:

sx init --type git --repo-url git@github.com:yourorg/skills.git # connect to the vault<br>sx install # pull down whatever's scoped to them

The client wires itself into each AI tool’s session startup with hooks, so it automatically re-syncs on its own - pulling new or updated skills and writing them into the correct .claude / .cursor / .codex / whatever folder for each person’s tool.

One gotcha: gitignore those folders

Because the client is writing into .claude/, .cursor/, .codex/ and the rest inside your repos, you’ll need to delete all those folders and add them to .gitignore (basically treat them as you would a build output folder).

That’s the pitch

To be completely transparent, we initially created this tool to support a product we’re developing, Skills.new. It adds a few fancy features on top of everything listed in this blog post, like usage stats and fine-grained governance/permissions.

This isn’t a bait-and-switch though. The sx client is fully open source (Apache 2.0), you don’t need to create any accounts with us and since you hook it up to a repo you manage, the data stays under your control.

If you end up trying it out, please send feedback our way.

Thankfully smart people are trying to come up with standards to address this. Some coding harnesses can also read configurations meant for others, but at the moment, it’s still not a solved problem. ↩