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 is needed for fuelclock-nz or nz-news. at-transport requires a free API key from dev-portal.at.govt.nz, and metservice-nz requires a MetOcean API key.

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.

Access policy

Skills prefer official APIs, feeds, and downloads that respond to public, unauthenticated requests. The shared lib/nzfetch.py helper makes one direct request first and, when a user has configured a proxy, may make a bounded set of retries for blocked responses, rate limits, truncated reads, or recognised challenge pages. Proxy settings are optional secrets loaded from the environment; skills must never commit, print, or include them in errors.

If the bounded attempts cannot retrieve the public resource, the skill must return an explicit blocked or rate-limited outcome rather than an empty success. The repository does not provide CAPTCHA solving, authentication bypass, protected-token forgery, account operation, checkout, booking, payment, or transaction automation. Full contributor guidance is in CONTRIBUTING.md, and source operators can request removal, attribution, rate changes, or a different supported integration through COMPLAINTS.md.

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
• templates/ for the five source/workflow scaffold variants
• scripts/ for scaffolding, validation, contracts, pack installation, and catalogue generation
• skills.json and packs/ for generated discovery and trust-based installation manifests

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

Install a trust pack

The default nz-public-data pack contains only public read-only connectors. It excludes commercial websites, personal data, paid providers, internal publishing workflows, and artifact writers. Preview an installation before copying it into an explicit skills directory:

python3 scripts/install_pack.py nz-public-data \
  --target /absolute/path/to/agent-skills \
  --dry-run

python3 scripts/install_pack.py nz-public-data \
  --target /absolute/path/to/agent-skills

The six generated manifests and their trust models are documented in docs/packs.md. Existing users can continue using the legacy nz-skills aggregate while migrating to a narrower pack.

For businesses whose APIs we touch