pcx-wave/update-skills

If you use Claude Code and have collected a pile of custom skills from random GitHub repos, gists, and blog posts, you probably have no way to tell which ones are out of date. There is no central registry for these skills and no version manager, so each SKILL.md file sits in your folder with no link back to where it came from. update-skills is a small Python tool that tries to close that gap. It figures out where each skill originated, tracks what version you have, and can update or roll back any of them with one command. The project installs into your Claude skills directory. You clone the repo to ~/.claude/skills/update-skills, then on first use you ask Claude to find the source repos for your skills. The tool reads each SKILL.md, picks out verbatim phrases from the first ten lines, searches DuckDuckGo for those phrases, fetches the candidate remote SKILL.md files, and accepts a match only if a sentence appears word for word in both. That filter is meant to reject forks and unrelated skills with similar names. Once a match is confirmed, it writes a hidden .skill-source file with the repo path and the commit SHA, so the lookup runs once per skill. After sources are resolved, you check for updates with a Python script. With a GITHUB_TOKEN set, it compares the exact commit SHA of your installed version against the upstream repo. Without a token, it falls back to comparing SKILL.md contents. The README is upfront about the tradeoff: no token still works, but you may miss updates that change other files in a skill, and you are capped at 60 API requests per hour. The same script can update all outdated skills at once or a chosen list of named ones. If an update breaks something, the tool keeps a backup of the previous version and offers a revert command for a single skill or for all of them. The project uses only the Python standard library, needs Python 3.10 or newer, and has no pip dependencies, no virtual environment, and no API key requirement for the core source-resolution step.