Skillful

A Copilot CLI plugin that teaches agents how to build self-managing repositories using Copilot CLI's own extension points — skills, agents, hooks, instructions, and more.

Install

copilot plugin install JonathanMace/skillful

Or install from a local clone:

copilot plugin install ./path/to/skillful

Verify it loaded:

copilot plugin list

Skills

Skill	What it does
writing-skills	Author reusable SKILL.md files that teach agents repeatable procedures and domain expertise.
bootstrap-skillful	Set up a repository with Copilot CLI infrastructure, protected-branch defaults, and the core docs needed for agent workflows.
convert-documents-to-markdown	Extract Markdown from PDFs and other document formats by installing and invoking Microsoft MarkItDown from the command line.
create-persona	Construct research-writing personas by deeply studying a person's publications, flagship papers, venues, and stylistic patterns.
latex-report	Produce LaTeX reports and PDF writeups with appropriate templates, modern fonts, and committed compiled PDFs.
related-work	Find and evaluate academic and practitioner related work by dispatching parallel background researchers across orthogonal topic areas.
review-document	Produce critical second-pass document reviews by dispatching a fresh reviewer subagent with a task-specific identity.
writing-plugins	Package reusable skills, agents, hooks, and integrations into an installable Copilot CLI plugin.
writing-custom-agents	Author .agent.md profiles that give agents a focused role, model, and tool access — including orchestrating parallel subagents.
writing-custom-instructions	Author instruction files that enforce coding standards and workflow rules across all Copilot sessions.
writing-hooks	Author hooks.json files that run commands before or after agent actions for logging, guardrails, and automation.
git-checkpoint	Standardize a conflict-free git workflow for concurrent agents — branches, worktrees, commits, PRs, merges, and cleanup.
agent-design-patterns	Named design patterns for multi-agent coordination — reviewer panels, mentor constellations, ritual cadences, escalation ladders, and more.
session-analysis	Analyze Copilot CLI sessions — review agent behavior, audit tool usage, trace subagent lifecycles, and inspect token consumption.

Usage

Once installed, skills are automatically discovered by Copilot CLI. Ask the agent to perform a task that matches a skill and it will activate, or invoke one explicitly:

/skills list
/skills invoke writing-skills

Structure

skillful/
├── plugin.json                        # Plugin manifest
└── skills/
    ├── bootstrap-skillful/            # Bootstrap Copilot CLI repository scaffolding
    │   ├── SKILL.md
    │   └── templates/*
    ├── convert-documents-to-markdown/ # Read PDFs and other docs via MarkItDown
    │   └── SKILL.md
    ├── create-persona/                # Build repository research-writing personas
    │   ├── SKILL.md
    │   ├── guides/*.md
    │   └── templates/*.md
    ├── agent-design-patterns/         # Multi-agent coordination patterns
    │   ├── SKILL.md
    │   └── patterns/*.md
    ├── git-checkpoint/                # Conflict-free git workflow
    │   └── SKILL.md
    ├── latex-report/                  # Author LaTeX reports and PDF writeups
    │   └── SKILL.md
    ├── related-work/                  # Find and synthesise related work
    │   └── SKILL.md
    ├── review-document/               # Critically review completed documents
    │   └── SKILL.md
    ├── session-analysis/              # Session retrospective analysis
    │   ├── SKILL.md
    │   └── scripts/session_analyzer.py
    ├── writing-plugins/               # Author plugin.json-based CLI plugins
    │   └── SKILL.md
    ├── writing-custom-agents/         # Author .agent.md files
    │   └── SKILL.md
    ├── writing-custom-instructions/   # Author copilot-instructions.md
    │   └── SKILL.md
    ├── writing-hooks/                 # Author hooks.json
    │   └── SKILL.md
    └── writing-skills/                # Author SKILL.md files
        └── SKILL.md

Development

Skills distributed by this plugin are authored directly in skills/. Validate them by installing the plugin with Copilot CLI from a local clone or GitHub and invoking the installed skills. Do not mirror plugin skills into .github/skills/.