Skill Shelf FAQs

Question 1

Can I add custom skills to Skill Shelf, and how are they managed?

Accepted Answer

Yes, new skills can be easily defined as structured Markdown documents with frontmatter (name, description). Skill Shelf supports automatic hot-reloading of the skill index upon file changes, ensuring continuous updates without requiring a restart. Skills can also be grouped for organizational purposes.

Question 2

How does Skill Shelf minimize context overhead compared to traditional methods?

Accepted Answer

Unlike traditional approaches that keep all skill descriptions resident in the LLM's context (wasting thousands of tokens), Skill Shelf stores skills locally. Only 6 lightweight tool definitions are in context, and skills are loaded on-demand via search, achieving near-zero overhead when skills are not actively in use.

Question 3

What is Skill Shelf and how does it benefit LLMs?

Accepted Answer

Skill Shelf provides Large Language Models (LLMs) with on-demand access to hundreds of professional skills through a local search-based routing mechanism. This significantly minimizes context overhead, allowing LLMs to utilize vast skill sets without wasting tokens by permanently storing skill descriptions in context.

Question 4

Does Skill Shelf support multilingual queries?

Accepted Answer

Yes, Skill Shelf incorporates a language strategy where it guides the LLM to search in the user's preferred language first. If no results are found, it automatically retries the search using English, enhancing accessibility and reducing the need for authors to provide multiple language descriptions.

Question 5

How does Skill Shelf handle skill searching and retrieval?

Accepted Answer

It uses a flat, fuzzy search across all available skills, employing multi-criteria scoring for precise, deterministic retrieval. The search mechanism ranks matches based on exact name, prefix, substring, token overlap, and Levenshtein distance, returning top results efficiently.

Skill Shelf

Skill Shelf

Key Features

Use Cases

Key Features

Use Cases