Topical Agent Skill packs¶

The full skills/ catalog is useful when an agent needs broad coverage, but loading every skill can add unnecessary context. The topical pack manifest provides small, versioned selections for common OpenMed workflows:

Manifest contract¶

skills/packs/manifest.json is a local, version-controlled contract. manifest_version is the schema version, each pack has its own semantic version, and every entry in skills is a stable skill identifier: the kebab-case directory name containing SKILL.md.

A skill may appear in only one topical pack. Skills that are not selected remain available from the full catalog and are intentionally not copied into a pack.

Each pack declares two budgets:

• max_skills limits the number of selected skills.
• max_bytes limits the sum of regular files below those source skill directories. Symlink targets are not followed while measuring the budget.

The builder rejects missing skill directories, duplicate membership, invalid identifiers, and budget overruns before it writes output. It revalidates both file-loaded and in-memory manifests at the write boundary, so a caller cannot bypass the identifier and containment rules with precomputed metadata.

Validate and build locally¶

The builder uses only the Python standard library and reads the checked-in manifest and skill folders. It never makes a network request:

python scripts/skills/build_packs.py --check
python scripts/skills/build_packs.py --output build/skill-packs

The default build creates one directory per pack. Each directory contains a small pack.json selection record and a skills/ directory of relative symlinks back to the canonical source folders, so the SKILL.md content has a single source of truth:

build/skill-packs/privacy/
├── pack.json
└── skills/
    ├── auditing-deid-leakage -> the source skill directory
    └── deidentifying-clinical-text -> the source skill directory

Build one or more packs with repeated --pack options:

python scripts/skills/build_packs.py \
  --pack privacy \
  --pack evaluation \
  --output build/skill-packs

On a platform where directory symlinks are unavailable, generate the same validated metadata and install selection without links:

python scripts/skills/build_packs.py \
  --pack privacy \
  --selection-only \
  --output build/skill-pack-selections

pack.json contains the pack identifier and version, selected stable skill identifiers, declared budgets, and the measured byte size. It contains no skill body, raw clinical text, or machine-specific absolute path. Metadata is written to a sibling temporary file, synced, and atomically replaced so a failed rebuild preserves the previous valid selection record.

The existing install-skills.sh command continues to install the complete catalog. Packs are an opt-in context and installation selection; they do not change OpenMed runtime behavior or provide a compliance certification.