stacker

Stack your agent skills instead of picking one.

Works with Claude Code · Codex · Gemini CLI · opencode · Cursor

The problem (we created it ourselves)

Skills are great, so we install lots of them. Soon several can do the same job: web access via firecrawl and agent-browser and a cloud browser and the agent's native fetch. Faced with overlap, agents fail in one of two ways:

• Load ALL of them into context "just in case" — bloat, conflicting instructions, improvisation.
• Pick "the best" one — except evals show there is no best one. Each tool is a little better at some things and a little worse at others. The deltas are real but axis-specific.

Choosing one skill throws away every axis the others were better at.

The idea

Don't route. Don't hoard. Stack.

                    one frozen task spec
                             │
           ┌─────────────────┼─────────────────┐
           ▼                 ▼                 ▼
      firecrawl        agent-browser      cloud browser    ← isolated branches,
      (branch A)        (branch B)         (branch C)        own context each
           └─────────────────┼─────────────────┘
                             ▼
              score: complete / correct / clean
                             ▼
      merge: best-of · union · patch · consensus · synthesis
                             ▼
              one output + provenance report

The unit you combine is the output, never the context. The stacked result beats any single tool because their failures don't overlap. It's ensembling, applied to agent skills.

Install

With the skills CLI:

npx skills add ogarciarevett/stacker

Or manually — copy the skill folder into your agent's skills directory:

# Claude Code
cp -r skills/stacker ~/.claude/skills/stacker

# Any agent using a shared skills dir
cp -r skills/stacker ~/.agents/skills/stacker

Persisting a stack — stack.sh

A stack you build more than twice should become a skill of its own: one stacked skill that owns the routing, with the overlapping sources unloaded from the agent's discovery path without deleting anything:

bash skills/stacker/scripts/stack.sh stash --into ~/.agents/skills/web-access \
  firecrawl firecrawl-scrape firecrawl-search agent-browser

bash skills/stacker/scripts/stack.sh status  --from ~/.agents/skills/web-access
bash skills/stacker/scripts/stack.sh doctor  --from ~/.agents/skills/web-access
bash skills/stacker/scripts/stack.sh restore --from ~/.agents/skills/web-access  # exact undo

• Symlink-installed sources (the skills-CLI norm) are unlinked from discovery and re-linked under <stacked>/sources/<name> — the canonical copy keeps receiving upstream updates and the stack sees them through the link. No re-pull, no vendoring.
• Real directories are moved (never copied, never deleted) under sources/.
• Agent-managed skills are never touched. Claude Code plugin skills (claude-in-chrome), Gemini CLI extensions, Cursor extensions, opencode plugins, Codex installs — stacker detects the agents on your machine (binary or config root) and refuses to move anything they own, whichever CLI runs the stack. Those go in the stacked skill's Routing table instead.
• sources/.manifest.tsv records everything, so restore is exact and doctor can audit link health and upstream freshness.
• The stacked skill's SKILL.md must declare its Routing table and a Sources table (where every skill came from) — template in the skill.

Where stacking pays

Web access is just the worked example — every skill collection grows the same overlap families:

Same rule everywhere: the sources fan out in isolated branches, only outputs come back, disagreements get reported instead of averaged away.

Copy-paste prompts

Stack a one-off, output-critical task:

Stack this task: extract the full pricing table from https://example.com/pricing.
Fan out every capable skill in parallel on the same frozen spec, score the
outputs (complete/correct/clean), merge them, and show me where the tools
disagreed.

Turn a recurring overlap into a persistent stack:

My skills firecrawl, firecrawl-scrape, firecrawl-search and agent-browser all
overlap on web access. Use stacker to make web-access the stacked skill: stash
the sources with stack.sh so they stop loading but keep updating through
symlinks, and add the Routing + Sources tables to web-access's SKILL.md.

Stack a UI/UX review:

Stack a design review of src/app/dashboard: run my UI/UX skills (design
guidelines, frontend-ui engineering, accessibility, web-perf) as separate
branches on the same pages, then synthesize one critique that credits which
lens found what. Flag anything two lenses disagree on.

Stack a code review (works the same for TypeScript, Rust, Python…):

Stack a review of this PR: run the language reviewer (typescript), the generic
code-quality skill, and the security reviewer in parallel on the same diff.
Union the findings, dedupe, mark severity by consensus, and tell me which
findings only one reviewer caught.

Stack your memory systems before starting work:

Before we start: stack a recall pass for "payments retry logic" across my
memory systems (session memory, knowledge graph, learned instincts). Union the
results, dedupe, prefer the newest fact when they conflict, and flag anything
single-sourced as unverified.

Audit or grow an existing stack:

Run stacker's doctor on ~/.agents/skills/web-access, fix anything broken, and
stash any new overlapping web skill I've installed since.

Undo everything:

Restore all the skills stashed under ~/.agents/skills/web-access to exactly
where they were.

Evals

Prove it, don't vibe it — deterministic suite (sandboxed, no API keys) plus one LLM-judged case. See evals/:

bash evals/run.sh   # 18 assertions: footprint, loading, updates, restore, agent-managed, hardening

Real-world run (2026-07-03): stacking web-access over 9 sources (firecrawl + 7 subskills + agent-browser) took a Claude Code discovery path from 101 to 92 entries — one skill loads, every source stays updatable and reachable.

Repo structure

stacker/
├── README.md
├── LICENSE
├── assets/
│   └── stacker.svg         # the pancake logo (drawn by Codex, reviewed by Claude)
├── evals/
│   ├── README.md
│   ├── run.sh              # deterministic eval suite (sandboxed)
│   └── cases/              # one doc per eval case
└── skills/
    └── stacker/
        ├── SKILL.md        # the skill — this is what your agent reads
        └── scripts/
            └── stack.sh    # stash / restore / status / doctor

License

MIT

If stacker saved your context window, ⭐ star the repo — that's how other agents' humans find it.