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scaffold-skill

scaffold-skill creates a new Octopus skill with the right shape from the start — the frontmatter, the size discipline, the optional supporting files — and wires it into a bundle so it actually ships. It is the front door for extending the catalogue.

What it solves

A skill created ad hoc tends to come out wrong in small, compounding ways: missing or malformed frontmatter, a SKILL.md that sprawls past the point of being loadable, support files nested too deep to find — and, most commonly, a skill that exists but belongs to no bundle, so no one ever installs it. scaffold-skill makes the correct structure the default, so a new skill is consistent and discoverable on day one.

How it works

  • Correct structure — frontmatter with name + description, a SKILL.md kept ≤ 250 lines, and optional REFERENCE.md / EXAMPLES.md / scripts/ at one level of depth (no deep nesting to hunt through).
  • Bundle registration — the skill is registered into a target bundle as part of scaffolding, so no skill ships loose — every skill maps to a bundle a team can enable.

It is the counterpart to compress-skill (which shrinks existing skills): the *-skill family for authoring and maintaining the catalogue.

When to use

Whenever you’re adding a new capability to Octopus. Start here rather than copying an existing SKILL.md by hand — the structure and the bundle wiring come for free.