🔘 pi-toggle-skills

Toggle skill visibility in pi's system prompt

Flip disable-model-invocation on skills so the model only sees the ones you want.

---

The Problem

Pi loads skills from multiple directories and includes their names and descriptions in the system prompt. If you have many skills installed, the prompt gets noisy — the model sees every skill and may inappropriately trigger ones you rarely use.

Pi supports disable-model-invocation: true in SKILL.md frontmatter to hide a skill from the system prompt, but toggling it requires manually editing each YAML file. There's no interactive way to manage skill visibility.

The Solution

pi-toggle-skills gives you an interactive TUI to toggle which skills are visible to the model:

• Discover all skills from the standard directories (~/.pi/agent/skills/, .pi/skills/, etc.)
• Interactive /toggle-skills command — search, toggle, done
• Flips disable-model-invocation directly in each SKILL.md's YAML frontmatter
• Auto-reloads pi after saving so changes take effect immediately
• Subcommands for quick CLI-style enable/disable

When a skill has disable-model-invocation: true, pi excludes it from the system prompt entirely. The skill is still available via explicit /skill:name commands — it just won't be suggested to the model automatically.

Usage

Interactive Commands

Command	What it does
/toggle-skills	Open interactive TUI to toggle skill visibility
/toggle-skills status	Show current skills and their visibility status
/toggle-skills disable <name>	Hide a skill from the system prompt
/toggle-skills enable <name>	Show a skill in the system prompt
/toggle-skills list	Same as /toggle-skills status
/toggle-skills help	Show usage reference

Interactive TUI Keybindings

Key	Action
Enter	Toggle selected skill
Ctrl+A	Disable all (filtered if search active)
Ctrl+D	Enable all (filtered if search active)
Ctrl+S	Save changes (run /reload to apply)
Esc	Cancel (discard changes)
Ctrl+C	Clear search, or cancel if empty
↑/↓	Navigate the list

CLI Examples

/toggle-skills disable brave-search
→ Disabled: "brave-search" — hidden from system prompt. Run /reload to apply.

/toggle-skills enable brave-search
→ Enabled: "brave-search" — visible in system prompt. Run /reload to apply.

Installation

With pi install (recommended):

pi install https://github.com/monotykamary/pi-toggle-skills

With npm:

npm install pi-toggle-skills

Or in ~/.pi/agent/settings.json:

{
  "packages": ["https://github.com/monotykamary/pi-toggle-skills"]
}

Then /reload or restart pi.

For quick one-off tests:

pi -e ./toggle-skills.ts

How It Works

Session starts
  → Extension discovers skills from standard directories
  → Parses SKILL.md YAML frontmatter to check disable-model-invocation
  → Notifies how many visible/hidden skills

/toggle-skills (interactive):
  → Opens TUI selector listing all skills
  → Changes collected in-memory (no disk writes until Ctrl+S)
  → Ctrl+S: writes changed SKILL.md files, notifies user to /reload
  → Esc: discards changes, no files modified

/toggle-skills disable/enable:
  → Toggles disable-model-invocation in SKILL.md frontmatter
  → Adds the key when disabling, removes it when enabling (false is the default)
  → Uses gray-matter for safe YAML round-tripping
  → User must /reload for changes to take effect

The extension does NOT monkey-patch any pi internals. It modifies SKILL.md files on disk and relies on pi's skill re-scanning on /reload to apply changes.

Frontmatter Changes

When disabling a skill, the extension adds disable-model-invocation: true to the SKILL.md frontmatter:

---
name: my-skill
description: Does things
disable-model-invocation: true # ← added
---

When enabling, the key is removed entirely (since false/absent are equivalent):

---
name: my-skill
description: Things done
---

Skill Directories Scanned

The extension scans the same directories pi uses:

Directory	Scope
~/.pi/agent/skills/	Global (pi-specific)
~/.agents/skills/	Global (agent-standard)
.pi/skills/	Project (pi-specific)
.agents/skills/	Project (agent-standard)

Package skills, settings skills, and --skill paths are not currently scanned (they require reading settings.json and CLI args).

Comparison with Alternatives

Approach	Pros	Cons
pi-toggle-skills (this)	Interactive TUI; directly modifies SKILL.md; no intermediate config; auto-reload; batch changes with undo	Changes require /reload; doesn't scan package/settings/CLI skills
Manual SKILL.md editing	No extension needed	Tedious; error-prone YAML editing; must remember frontmatter syntax
Deleting SKILL.md files	Effective	Destructive; must restore to re-enable; can't toggle back easily

Development

npm install
npm test          # Vitest unit tests
npm run typecheck # TypeScript validation (pi-tui import error is expected — types resolve at runtime)
npm run lint:dead # Dead code detection (knip)

Structure

.
├── toggle-skills.ts        # Main extension
├── src/
│   ├── index.ts             # Constants, types, and utilities
│   ├── skill-discovery.ts   # Skill directory scanning, frontmatter parsing/writing
│   └── skill-selector.ts    # Interactive TUI component
├── __tests__/
│   └── unit/
│       ├── toggle-skills.test.ts
│       └── skill-discovery.test.ts
├── package.json
├── tsconfig.json
├── vitest.config.ts
└── knip.json

License

MIT