nz-skills

thecolab-ai/.skills

Community-contributed AI skills for useful New Zealand-specific data and workflows.

Point your agent at real NZ infrastructure, public datasets, market data, industry feeds, transport APIs, pricing sources, weather services, and other useful local information.

What is this?

Think Folding@home, but for spare AI tokens. Instead of donating idle compute, the community contributes skills that make New Zealand-specific data actually usable by AI agents.

Every skill in this repo is a drop-in connector. Clone the repo, install the skill, and your agent gains access to real NZ-relevant data without you having to reverse-engineer the source.

Try it in 30 seconds

git clone https://github.com/thecolab-ai/.skills
cd .skills

# NZ fuel prices, supply, and vessels
python3 skills/fuelclock-nz/scripts/cli.py summary

# Latest NZ news
python3 skills/nz-news/scripts/cli.py headlines

# NZ supermarket stores and pricing history
python3 skills/grocer-nz/scripts/cli.py stores --query Papakura

# Auckland Transport real-time (needs AT API key)
python3 skills/at-transport/scripts/cli.py alerts

No auth needed for fuelclock-nz, metservice-nz, or nz-news. at-transport requires a free API key from dev-portal.at.govt.nz.

Optional browser-assisted mode

Most skills use direct public HTTP/API calls. Some modern sites only expose useful public data reliably inside a real browser context, especially on headless servers. Those skills may offer an explicit --browser flag.

Recommended runtime: CloakBrowser. Full convention: docs/browser-assisted-skills.md.

Recommended convention:

• --browser should use CloakBrowser when it is installed.
• CloakBrowser must be optional: normal validation and non-browser smoke tests should still run on clean hosts.
• If CloakBrowser is missing, the CLI should return a clear cloakbrowser_not_installed error so the agent can recommend installing it instead of silently pretending browser mode ran.
• Browser-assisted skills must stay read-only and stop before login, checkout, payment, booking, cart mutation, or protected account actions.
• CAPTCHA, request-auth, and bot challenges are blocked states, not puzzles to defeat; return an explicit blocked flag or clear error and use a public fallback when one exists.

About this repository

This repo is intentionally structured like a proper skills library.

It includes:

• skills/ for real contributed skills
• spec/ for the Agent Skills spec link plus our repo stance
• template/ for a basic manual starting point
• templates/ for richer scaffold variants (minimal, cli-workflow, tool-wrapper)
• scripts/ for repo tooling like generation and validation (Python stdlib, no install needed)

We are borrowing the shape of the best public skills repos, but not copying their skill content.

For businesses whose APIs we touch

If you operate a service that one of these skills connects to and you'd prefer we didn't, email adam@thecolab.ai with the skill name and a brief reason. We action good-faith requests from the affected operator promptly, usually within 5 working days. Full process in COMPLAINTS.md.

But before you do, hear us out on why we built this.

These skills access endpoints that respond to unauthenticated public requests. We don't bypass authentication or circumvent technical access controls. Users of these skills are responsible for complying with the terms of service of the underlying provider. What we've done is make that data legible to AI agents, so a Kiwi using an LLM can actually get useful answers about NZ fuel prices, bus times, pharmacy stock, or property data without us all reinventing the same wrapper a thousand times.

The thing is, agents are going to access this data either way. The only question is whether they do it well, with one clean shared connector, or badly, with ten thousand half-broken scrapers hammering your servers. We think one clean connector is better for everyone, you included.

If you're a business looking at this and thinking "how do we actually want AI agents to interact with our data" rather than "how do we stop them", that's a conversation worth having. We do that work. Email adam@thecolab.ai or open an issue and we'll help you design the right surface: a proper agent-ready API, sensible rate limits, an auth model that fits, the lot. The businesses that figure this out early will own their corner of the agent economy. The ones that don't will get scraped anyway, just less efficiently.

Available skills