@egradman/prowess

prowess

Run AI coding agents with temporary skills. No permanent installation — skills are cached locally and loaded via a temp plugin directory that's cleaned up on exit.

npx prowess claude vercel-labs/agent-skills -s web-design-guidelines

How it works

• Parses your skill source (GitHub repo, GitLab, local path, direct URL)
• Clones it (or uses a cached copy from ~/.prowess/cache/)
• Discovers all SKILL.md files in the repo
• Copies selected skills into a temp plugin directory
• Launches the agent with the skills available
• Cleans up the temp directory on exit

Usage

prowess <agent> <source> [-s/--skill <name>...]

Source formats

Format	Example
owner/repo	vercel-labs/agent-skills
GitHub URL	https://github.com/someone/skills
GitHub URL with ref + subpath	https://github.com/someone/skills/tree/main/advanced
GitLab URL	https://gitlab.com/someone/skills
Direct SKILL.md URL	https://raw.githubusercontent.com/.../SKILL.md
Local path	./my-skills
Any git URL	[e-mail]:someone/skills.git

Examples

# Load all skills from a repo
npx prowess claude vercel-labs/agent-skills

# Pick specific skills
npx prowess claude vercel-labs/agent-skills -s web-design-guidelines -s react-best-practices

# From a local directory
npx prowess claude ./my-custom-skills

# From a GitHub URL with a subpath
npx prowess claude https://github.com/someone/repo/tree/main/skills/advanced

Caching

Cloned repos are cached in ~/.prowess/cache/. On subsequent runs, prowess does a git pull to refresh the cache instead of re-cloning. To force a fresh clone, delete the cache directory:

rm -rf ~/.prowess/cache/

Supported agents

• claude — Launches Claude Code with --plugin-dir
• pi — Launches Pi Agent with --plugin-dir

Adding an agent

Each agent is a single file in agents/ that exports a launch(tempPluginDir) function. For example, agents/claude.js is ~8 lines. If your agent supports a --plugin-dir flag or similar mechanism, adding support is straightforward.

PRs welcome for: Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, Amp, Cline, Roo, or anything else that can load skills.

License

MIT