Garden Skills

A curated collection of production-ready Agent Skills for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and other AI coding agents.

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Table of contents

web-video-presentation

Category: Web Video / Presentation Engineering
Best for: turning scripts, articles, lessons, product demos, and talks into click-driven 16:9 web presentations that can be screen-recorded as cinematic videos.

web-video-presentation builds record-ready Vite + React + TypeScript presentations that behave like video production surfaces. The workflow turns raw articles into narration scripts, maps script beats to full-screen scenes, pauses at required checkpoints, and can optionally synthesize narration audio after the visual outline is approved.

Highlights:

• Fixed 1920×1080 stage that scales to the viewport for stable screen recording
• Click / keyboard driven (chapter, step) cursor, with one narration beat per visual step
• Hard collaboration checkpoints for script, theme, outline, implementation mode, and optional audio
• Hidden hover-only progress controls so the stage stays clean while recording
• Theme-token architecture with 23 built-in themes, each with its own design signature — editorial, terminal, engineering, Swiss International, and more
• Pluggable TTS — provider-agnostic audio runner; ships two built-in providers (MiniMax mmx-cli + OpenAI TTS via curl) plus a contract + ready-to-paste snippets for ElevenLabs / edge-tts / Azure / Google Cloud / macOS say
• Scaffolded Vite + React + TypeScript project with reusable stage primitives and recording guidance

↑ All 23 themes at a glance — open the full gallery for live 16:9 previews, design signatures, and best-for tags.

Links: README · SKILL.md · Download v1.2.2 .zip

web-design-engineer

Category: Design / Frontend
Best for: web pages, landing pages, dashboards, interactive prototypes, HTML slide decks, animations, UI mockups, data visualizations, and design-system explorations.

web-design-engineer turns AI-generated web artifacts from merely functional into polished, deliberate, and visually memorable front-end work. It treats the agent as a design engineer: first understanding product context, then declaring a design system, showing an early v0, building the full experience, and verifying the result.

Highlights:

• Converts the brief into a five-dial Design Read covering variance, motion, density, asset dependence, and brand fidelity
• Distinguishes extension, preserve, and overhaul redesign modes before changing an existing product
• Runs executable browser acceptance only when the user explicitly requests acceptance, QA, or browser testing
• Pushes beyond generic AI UI patterns with an anti-cliché blocklist and stronger visual judgment
• Ships a Design Direction Advisor (six differentiated schools) + 25 anchored style recipes (Linear / Aesop / Pentagram / Bloomberg / Stripe Press / Mid-Century, etc.) — each recipe carries concrete palette, typography, signature moves, and anti-patterns ready to paste into the design-system declaration
• Covers HTML / CSS / JavaScript / React prototypes, with guidance for responsive layout, motion, and interaction polish
• Includes practical implementation rules for inline React + Babel, CSS tokens, oklch() color work, container queries, and reduced-motion handling
• Ships an advanced patterns reference for device frames, slide engines, animation timelines, dashboards, and other reusable web artifacts

↑ 12 of 25 anchored recipes — open the full gallery for all 25 working artefacts (apothecary pages, trading workstations, magazine covers, Y2K portals, mid-century posters …) with signature moves and best-for tags.

Links: README · SKILL.md · Website · Demo · Download v1.3.0 .zip

gpt-image-2

Category: Image Generation / Prompt Engineering
Best for: posters, UI mockups, product visuals, infographics, academic figures, technical diagrams, comics, avatars, storyboards, branding boards, and image-editing workflows.

gpt-image-2 is a focused image-generation skill for GPT Image 2 and OpenAI-compatible image APIs. It is designed to work across different agent environments: fully local Garden generation, host-native image-tool delegation, or prompt-only advisor mode when no image tool is available.

Highlights:

• Supports three runtime modes: Mode A Garden local, Mode B host-native delegation, and Mode C advisor-only prompt writing
• Starts every task with mode detection so the skill does not silently choose the wrong execution path
• Provides 18 visual categories and 79 structured prompt templates under references/
• Covers both image generation and image editing through dedicated workflows and scripts
• Saves prompts and generated images under garden-gpt-image-2/ in Garden mode for reuse, review, and versioning

Selected live cases

↑ 12 selected cases from the 160+ public case library — open the skill gallery for more templates, or browse the live website.

Links: README · SKILL.md · Website · Download v1.0.4 .zip

kb-retriever

Category: Retrieval / Local Knowledge Base
Best for: answering questions from a local knowledge/ directory, searching structured documentation, and extracting evidence from Markdown, text, PDF, and Excel files without flooding the agent context.

kb-retriever is a local knowledge-base retriever built around careful, progressive search. Instead of loading whole files, it navigates hierarchical index files, narrows the candidate set, processes complex file types correctly, and answers with sources.

Highlights:

• Uses layered data_structure.md files to navigate the knowledge base before searching content
• Enforces a learn-before-process rule for PDF and Excel files, using the included reference docs before extraction or analysis
• Combines precise keyword search, local windowed reads, synonyms, and iterative refinement
• Bounds retrieval to at most 5 search rounds so exploration stays controlled
• Includes workflows for grep, pdftotext, pdfplumber, and pandas, with source-aware answer formatting

Links: README · SKILL.md · Download v1.0.1 .zip

beautiful-article

Category: Editorial · Any source → beautiful article
Best for: turning URLs, PDFs, DOCX, Markdown, plain text, screenshots, and pasted notes into a polished, share-ready article — long-form, briefings, explainers, tutorials, post-mortems, visual essays, dialogue transcripts.

beautiful-article is an editorial harness skill: it does not just "make a webpage", it edits and designs the source material into a polished article that is easier to read, share, and archive than the original. The skill flows through a small source → plan → double-confirmation → build → final review → repair loop and pauses at three hard checkpoints so the user keeps editorial control over article type, theme, layout, image strategy, cover, and delivery format.

Highlights:

• Article first — the focus is the article: better reading, better pacing, better aesthetics. Delivery is a self-contained file (HTML, optional PDF), but that's a delivery detail, not the goal
• Reacticle component protocol — prose-first semantic components (Hero / Lead / Section / Quote / Callout / Image / Formula / CodeBlock / Table…) plus a theme-token-only Raw free layer; the underlying React library lives at ConardLi/reacticle
• 10 article types with bundled retention ratios — longform · ~100% / tutorial · ~90% / full-report · ~80% / explainer · ~80% / dialogue · ~80% / review · ~70% / essay · ~70% / briefing · ~50% / visual-essay · ~40% / interactive-explainer · ~25% excerpt + 75% AI-rebuild
• 11 authoring theme profiles (tufte, press, bayer, bodoni, vignelli, sottsass, freddie, andy, fuller, knuth, shannon) — each is a Markdown contract for the agent rather than a CSS file
• Hard collaboration checkpoints with item-by-item decision capture (no silent defaults), plus a 3:4 book-style cover, default-on TOC, and language-aware translation step
• Per-node quality protocol — main-agent inline checks for plan, sub-agent reviewers for first spread / sections / final review, repair as minimal slices

Theme gallery

Links: README · SKILL.md · Download v0.1.0 .zip

Install

There are five supported install paths. Pick the one that fits your stack:

Each skill section above also has a Download v<version> .zip link in its "Links:" row that points at the current pinned release artifact. Those URLs are auto-rewritten by scripts/release/update-readme.mjs on every release, so they always advertise the latest immutable version.

Option A · skills CLI (npx)

The fastest agent-agnostic path. Uses the standard npx skills CLI, which auto-detects your agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, etc.) and drops the skill into the right directory.

# Install all four skills (latest)
npx skills add ConardLi/garden-skills

# Install just one skill (latest)
npx skills add ConardLi/garden-skills -s web-design-engineer

# Install globally (~/.skills) instead of per-project (./.skills)
npx skills add ConardLi/garden-skills -s gpt-image-2 --global

# Target a specific agent
npx skills add ConardLi/garden-skills -s kb-retriever -a claude-code

Defaults to the latest commit on main. That's what you want 95% of the time — the CLI tracks each skill's most recent published SKILL.md straight from the source tree.

Want a pinned version? (CI / production) Use a tag-scoped tree/ URL — this points at the exact commit a release was cut from:

# Pin one skill to a specific release
npx skills add ConardLi/garden-skills/tree/web-design-engineer-v1.0.0/skills/web-design-engineer

For each skill, the current pinned .zip URL is also shown inline in its "Links:" row above (the Download v<version> .zip link).

Useful sub-commands:

npx skills list                 # what's installed
npx skills find web-design      # search registries
npx skills update               # bump everything
npx skills remove kb-retriever  # uninstall

Option B · Claude Code plugin marketplace

If you use Claude Code, you can subscribe to the marketplace and install plugin packs that bundle one or more skills together:

/plugin marketplace add ConardLi/garden-skills
/plugin install presentation-skills@garden-skills
/plugin install web-design-skills@garden-skills
/plugin install knowledge-base-skills@garden-skills
/plugin install image-generation-skills@garden-skills

Plugin packs are declared in .claude-plugin/marketplace.json:

Option C · Pinned .zip from Releases

Every formal release publishes an immutable .zip (with a SHA-256 checksum) to GitHub Releases. Pin to this from CI, Dockerfiles, or air-gapped installers when you need the exact bytes to never move under you.

# Replace <skill> and <version> with the version you want.
SKILL=web-design-engineer
VERSION=1.0.0

curl -fsSL -o "${SKILL}.zip" \
  "https://github.com/ConardLi/garden-skills/releases/download/${SKILL}-v${VERSION}/${SKILL}-${VERSION}.zip"

# Verify the checksum (highly recommended for unattended installs)
curl -fsSL -o "${SKILL}.zip.sha256" \
  "https://github.com/ConardLi/garden-skills/releases/download/${SKILL}-v${VERSION}/${SKILL}-${VERSION}.zip.sha256"
shasum -a 256 -c "${SKILL}.zip.sha256"

# Drop the folder into the agent's skills directory
unzip -q "${SKILL}.zip" -d .claude/skills/   # or .agents/skills/, .codex/skills/, ...

A floating "always-latest" URL is also available — useful for one-off installs:

https://github.com/ConardLi/garden-skills/releases/latest/download/<skill>-<version>.zip

Pinned URLs for every skill are listed inline in this README — see the "Download" line under each skill's "Links" entry above. They are kept in sync automatically by the release pipeline.

Option D · Manual copy into your project

Clone the repo and copy the skill folder you want — handy if you want to fork or hack on the skill itself.

git clone https://github.com/ConardLi/garden-skills.git
cp -r garden-skills/skills/web-design-engineer  your-project/.claude/skills/
# Cursor / generic agent:
cp -r garden-skills/skills/web-design-engineer  your-project/.agents/skills/

The agent discovers the skill the next time it scans the workspace.

Option E · Git submodule

For vendoring into a larger project where you want to track upstream updates:

git submodule add https://github.com/ConardLi/garden-skills.git vendor/garden-skills
ln -s ../../vendor/garden-skills/skills/web-design-engineer .claude/skills/web-design-engineer

Pin to a release tag for reproducibility:

cd vendor/garden-skills
git checkout web-design-engineer-v1.0.0

Compatibility

The SKILL.md format is portable by design — if your agent supports skills, copy the folder into the directory it scans, and it should work. PRs welcome to extend this matrix.

What is a Skill?

A Skill is a self-contained folder the agent can load on-demand. It's just a SKILL.md (YAML frontmatter + instructions), optionally accompanied by reference docs, scripts, and assets:

<skill-name>/
├── SKILL.md      ← required: when to use it + how to do it
├── README.md     ← human-facing docs
├── references/   ← optional: extended docs the agent loads on demand
├── scripts/      ← optional: deterministic executable helpers
└── assets/       ← optional: templates, fonts, icons

The agent decides whether to activate the skill from the description line in the frontmatter — so the description is the contract between you and the agent. For the full spec, see agentskills.io and Anthropic's reference repository.

Contributing

Bug reports, new skills, and tooling improvements are all welcome.

The maintainer-facing docs — repository layout, release process, version rules, CI workflow, troubleshooting — live in CONTRIBUTING.md (中文). Read that first if you want to add a skill or cut a release.

Quick orientation:

git clone https://github.com/ConardLi/garden-skills.git
cd garden-skills
npm run list      # show all skills + manifest status
npm run validate  # the same check CI runs on every PR

Acknowledgments

This collection stands on the shoulders of:

• Anthropic for the Agent Skills spec and the anthropics/skills reference repository.
• Claude Design — the system prompt that inspired web-design-engineer. The original is preserved in dist/prompt/claude-design-system-prompt.md for reference.
• The broader OSS skill community — see travisvn/awesome-claude-skills and obra/superpowers for further discovery.

Connect

License

MIT © ConardLi