Skill Gate

Interactive skill visibility manager for pi coding agent

Features • Installation • Usage • Configuration • How It Works

Control which skills are injected into the initial system prompt with /skill-gate. Browse full skill content, toggle visibility on or off, and invoke skills — all from a keyboard-driven overlay. Skills that are not injected can still be executed manually in chat. State is persisted across sessions and injected into the system prompt before every agent run.

Features

• Complete skill coverage — uses pi's ResourceLoader API with dynamic directory discovery to match /skill: autocomplete (including extension-contributed, project-memory, and migrated package skills)
• Skill browser — view the complete SKILL.md content (description, when-to-use, procedure, prompt body) for every skill with syntax-highlighted markdown rendering
• Toggle visibility — enable or disable skills individually; disabled skills are excluded from the system prompt
• Persistent state — toggle state saved to ~/.pi/agent/config/skill-gate.json
• System prompt injection — enabled skills are automatically inserted as <available_skills> before each agent start via the before_agent_start hook
• Respects native-disabled — skills with disableModelInvocation: true are marked with a disabled indicator and cannot be toggled
• Fast hook — before_agent_start filters from an in-memory cache — zero filesystem access per message

Installation

Via npm (recommended)

Install the package, then let pi discover it:

pi install npm:pi-skill-gate

Manual (local development)

Clone / copy the extension into your pi extensions directory:

git clone https://github.com/cullendotdev/pi-skill-gate.git
cp -r pi-skill-gate ~/.pi/agent/extensions/pi-skill-gate

Usage

/skill-gate

Opens an overlay showing all discovered skills.

Key	Action
↑ ↓	Navigate skills
Space	Toggle selected skill enabled/disabled
b	Toggle skill-list sidebar
PgUp PgDn	Scroll prompt content
Home End	Jump to top/bottom
Enter	Invoke skill into chat
Esc	Close

Configuration

skill-gate.json at ~/.pi/agent/config/skill-gate.json is created automatically. Only "enabled" keys are persisted; "disabled" is the default.

{
  "skills": {
    "code-review": "enabled",
    "blueprint": "disabled"
  }
}

[!WARNING] Corrupted JSON resets all toggles to disabled.

How It Works

session_start
        ↓
  DefaultResourceLoader + dynamic skill path discovery
  (walks agentDir for skills/ dirs not covered by includeDefaults,
   e.g. pi-hermes-memory/skills/, projects-memory/*/skills/)
        ↓                         ↓
  cachedSkills[]              skill-gate.json
  (Skill: name, desc,         (per-skill state)
   filePath, disableModelInvocation)
        ↓                         ↓
  SkillDetailOverlay ←── loadState() / persistToggle()
        ↓
  before_agent_start hook (in-memory filter)
        ↓
  buildVisibleBlock() → injected into system prompt

Skill discovery

The extension creates a DefaultResourceLoader at session_start with includeDefaults: true (covers ~/.pi/agent/skills/, npm package skills, and .agents/skills/) plus dynamically discovered additionalSkillPaths:

• Agent-level directories with skills/ subdirectories (e.g. pi-hermes-memory/skills/)
• Project memory skills (projects-memory/<project>/skills/)

This ensures the skill count always matches /skill: autocomplete, regardless of where skills are stored.

File Structure

pi-skill-gate/
├── index.ts            # Extension entry point
├── skills-lock.json
└── README.md