Kevin Veen-BirkenbachandClaude Opus 5
5ab58b1c28
Skills and MEMORY.md grow by accretion, and the cost is not spread evenly. MEMORY.md and every skill description load into every session; bodies load only when the skill fires; memory files only on recall. A 200-line body that fires twice a month costs less than four bloated pointers. essence ranks the work that way and reports the saving for the always-loaded surface separately, because that is the number the run exists for. A health pass runs before anything is cut: pointers without a file and files without a pointer, dead wikilinks, memories citing a file:line that no longer exists, one rule restated across several skills, a first-party skill shadowing a locked one, and a description that says what a skill does but never when it fires. Dead entries are deleted rather than compacted, and nothing is compacted around a stale citation, or the error survives in denser form. Two things are never cut: the evidence behind a memory, because a rule stripped of its incident degrades into an exhortation and stops changing behaviour, and any fact with no other home. Two memories whose evidence differs are never merged. Writing is in place, since an essence beside the original saves nothing. Guarded by a clean git status for the rewritten paths, .pre-essence copies for ~/.claude and ~/.agents which are not under git, and a diff with the saved lines and characters before one confirmation. Scope is asked with checkboxes and nothing outside it is touched. autotune routes its optimisation step here instead of trimming by hand. essence still asks for its scope on that path; the operator answers with the skill being optimised. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
skills 🧠
The agent skill collection of Kevin Veen-Birkenbach.
Every skill is pinned in skills-lock.json for reproducible installs.
First-party skills live under skills/ and are layered on top of the locked ones at install time.
Compatible with Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, Cline, and other agents.
Requirements 📦
- Node.js (provides
npx skills). jq(only required formake update).
Installation 🚀
Install the skills globally into your home (~/.agents/skills and ~/.claude/skills):
make install
Copy the skills into a specific project (<repo>/.agents/skills and <repo>/.claude/skills):
make project TARGET=/path/to/repo
Both commands also patch the target's .claude/settings.json: the caveman and ponytail plugins are enabled so their modes auto-activate on session start, and two reminder hooks are registered — autotune points you at /autotune at most once an hour, dream points you at /dream at most once every twelve hours per repository (stamped in that repository's git dir). Existing settings are preserved.
Restart your agent afterwards so it loads the new skills.
Maintenance 🔧
Refresh every skill to its latest version and rewrite skills-lock.json:
make update
Validate skills-lock.json and shellcheck the scripts (also run by CI on every push and after every update):
make test
Related Tools 🧰
This collection is part of a wider toolset for managing IT and infrastructure:
- alias — shell aliases for common commands.
- package-manager —
pkgmgr, a single command to install and manage these repositories. - infinito-nexus — automation platform for self-hosted infrastructure.
License 📜
MIT License, Copyright (c) 2026 Kevin Veen-Birkenbach.
Author 👤
Kevin Veen-Birkenbach kevin@veen.world
Thanks 🙏
Thanks to the #ai:infinito.nexus community, and especially to Paulinhx for the inspiration.
Donation ❤️
If these tools help you, consider supporting their development: