Initialize Maintenance

Set up persistent maintenance infrastructure in a skills repo. All steps are optional -- ask the user which ones to perform.

Target directory

If $ARGUMENTS is non-empty, use it as the target directory path (resolve relative to cwd). Otherwise, use the current working directory.

Examples:

/skill-maintainer:init-maintenance -- initialize in cwd
/skill-maintainer:init-maintenance ~/claude/mlx-skills -- initialize in mlx-skills

All paths in the steps below are relative to the target directory.

Steps

1. Create config directory

mkdir -p .skill-maintainer/state

2. Create config.json

Write .skill-maintainer/config.json with defaults:

{
  "upstream_urls": [
    "https://code.claude.com/docs/en/skills",
    "https://code.claude.com/docs/en/plugins",
    "https://code.claude.com/docs/en/plugins-reference",
    "https://code.claude.com/docs/en/discover-plugins",
    "https://code.claude.com/docs/en/plugin-marketplaces",
    "https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks-guide",
    "https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks",
    "https://code.claude.com/docs/en/sub-agents",
    "https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory"
  ],
  "tracked_repos": [],
  "llms_full_url": "https://code.claude.com/docs/llms-full.txt"
}

Ask the user if they have local git repos to track (e.g., coderef/ directories). Add paths to tracked_repos.

3. Copy best practices checklist

Copy references/best_practices.md (bundled with this plugin) to .skill-maintainer/best_practices.md. This checklist is the reference used by /skill-maintainer:maintain Phase 4.

4. Update .gitignore

Check if .gitignore exists. If it does, check if .skill-maintainer/state/ is already ignored. If not, append:

# skill-maintainer state (auto-generated, not tracked)
.skill-maintainer/state/

5. Optional: pre-commit hook for skills-ref validation

Ask the user if they want a pre-commit hook that validates SKILL.md files on commit. If yes, write .git/hooks/pre-commit:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

staged=$(git diff --cached --name-only --diff-filter=ACM | grep 'SKILL\.md$' || true)
[ -z "$staged" ] && exit 0

for f in $staged; do
  dir=$(dirname "$f")
  echo "Validating $dir..."
  uv run agentskills validate "$dir" || exit 1
done

Then: chmod +x .git/hooks/pre-commit

Only offer this if uv and agentskills (skills-ref) are available. Check with: uv run agentskills --version 2>/dev/null

After setup

Report what was created:

Config file path
State directory path
Whether .gitignore was updated
Whether pre-commit hook was installed

Suggest next steps:

Run /skill-maintainer:quality for an initial health check
Add tracked repos to config.json if needed
Run /skill-maintainer:maintain for a full maintenance pass

init-maintenance