Skills Repo Push

Updates local Claude skills at ~/.claude/skills from the skills repo (github.com/Theycallmeholla/skills, local clone: /Users/cursivemedia/skills), treating the repo as the source of truth.

Direction

Repo → Local — opposite of skills-repo-sync which goes local → repo.

What it does

1. Scans the repo's skills/ directory for all skill folders.
2. Compares each repo skill against ~/.claude/skills:
   • NEW: skill exists in repo but not locally
   • CHANGED: skill exists in both but content differs
   • IDENTICAL: skill matches exactly (skipped)
3. Preserves local-only skills — never deletes or modifies skills that exist only locally (e.g., adapt, polish, typeset, harden).
4. Reports what would change with file counts and diff sizes.
5. Applies changes only with --apply flag (dry-run by default).
6. Packages NEW+CHANGED skills into /tmp/skills-push-TIMESTAMP.tar.gz for manual Claude app upload.

Usage

# Dry run — see what would change
scripts/push.sh

# Apply changes to local skills
scripts/push.sh --apply

# Limit to specific skills
scripts/push.sh --apply skill1 skill2

# Custom paths via environment
REPO_DIR=/path/to/repo LOCAL_DIR=/path/to/local scripts/push.sh

Safety

• Dry-run by default — requires explicit --apply to write.
• Never deletes — local-only skills are left completely alone.
• Protects local state — some files accumulate real user data locally while the repo carries only a blank template. blog-topic-interview/references/opinion-bank.md is the live example: locally it holds the author's actual positions, in the repo it is placeholders. Overwriting it is silent data loss. Files matching PRESERVE_GLOBS are stashed before the update and restored on top of the fresh copy. Dry-run prints every file it will keep.
• Backs up before writing — each replaced skill folder is copied to /tmp/skills-push-backup-<timestamp>/ before anything is removed.
• Shows diffs — see exactly what changes before applying.

Add a pattern to PRESERVE_GLOBS whenever a skill starts writing state into its own folder. The default list is references/opinion-bank.md references/*-bank.md state.json.

Output

Dry-run mode shows:

• Count of NEW, CHANGED, IDENTICAL skills
• Per-skill change summary with file/line counts
• Tarball path for manual app upload
• Exact command to apply changes

Apply mode additionally:

• Copies NEW skills to local
• Updates CHANGED skills in place
• Reports final sync status

Environment

• REPO_DIR: Skills repo path (default: /Users/cursivemedia/skills)
• LOCAL_DIR: Local skills path (default: ~/.claude/skills)

Notes

• Compares only SKILL.md and subdirectory contents; ignores hidden files.
• Tarball includes only NEW+CHANGED skills for efficient app upload.
• Run after git pull in the repo to distribute updates locally.
• Claude app upload remains manual — extract tarball and upload through UI.