Update Installed Skills

Use when syncing or updating previously installed skills to their latest version. Always dry-run updates before applying, and check for breaking changes.

392 tokens

context cost

the whole folder, loaded on every use

files

instructions only

copies elsewhere

how many repositories repackaged it

1136

stars on the repo

on the repository, not the skill itself

Install

one command, takes just this skill from the repository

npx skills add https://github.com/MoizIbnYousaf/Ai-Agent-Skills --skill update-installed-skills

The instruction itself

5 sections, as written by the author

Update Installed Skills

Goal

Keep installed skills current without breaking the agent's workflow or silently overwriting local customizations.

Guardrails

Always use --dry-run before running a real update.
Check what is currently installed before updating: npx ai-agent-skills list --installed.
Never update all skills at once in production without reviewing the dry-run output.
Use --format json to capture structured update results for logging.

Workflow

List currently installed skills.

npx ai-agent-skills list --installed --format json --fields name

Check for available updates.

npx ai-agent-skills check

Dry-run the update.

npx ai-agent-skills sync <skill-name> --dry-run

Apply the update after reviewing.

npx ai-agent-skills sync <skill-name>

For bulk updates, review each skill's dry-run output.

npx ai-agent-skills sync --all --dry-run

Gotchas

Skills installed from GitHub will attempt a fresh clone during sync. If the upstream repo is gone, the update will fail gracefully.
Manually edited SKILL.md files will be overwritten by sync. Back up customizations before syncing.
The check command makes network requests to verify upstream sources. It may be slow or fail if sources are unreachable.

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26k tokens scripts

How to use it

Copy the folder

Take moizibnyousaf/update-installed-skills from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.

Check the name does not clash

The agent identifies a skill by the name field in its header. Two skills with the same name cannot sit side by side — one of them will be ignored.

Install what it needs

The instructions reference npx. Without those the skill loads but fails at the first command.