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Desktop AppSkills Editor

Skills Editor

The Skills Editor is where you edit the prompts that drive each pipeline phase. ShipCode calls these prompts “skills”: planning, adversarial review, plan revision, execution, verification, and PR body generation.

The component is apps/desktop/src/renderer/components/SkillsView.tsx.

What’s editable

SkillUsed byPurpose
plan-generationPlanner phaseTurns the issue body into a structured ShipCodePlan
adversarial-reviewReviewer phaseCritiques the plan before execution
plan-revisionRevision phaseRewrites the plan to address review findings
plan-executionExecutor phaseInstructions given to Claude / Codex / OpenRouter during execution
plan-verificationVerifier phaseChecks the diff, test output, and acceptance criteria
pr-generationShipping phaseGenerates the pull request body

Each editable phase skill starts from a bundled SKILL.md default. Saving in the app writes an override to the local SQLite skills table for either the selected project or the global scope. Project overrides beat global overrides, and invalid overrides are quarantined so ShipCode falls back to the next valid tier.

Where skills live

  • Bundled defaults live in ShipCode’s repo under skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md and are compiled into packages/agents/src/skills/defaults.generated.ts.
  • Global and project overrides live in the app database, keyed by (project_id, phase).
  • writing-prds is separate: ShipCode reads skills/writing-prds/SKILL.md from the target repo during PRD rewrite. It is surfaced in the Skills view as a repo skill location, not as an editable phase override.

The PRD generator reads skills/writing-prds/SKILL.md from the target repo (the repo whose issue you’re writing a PRD for), not from the ShipCode install itself. This means a project can evolve its own PRD style without touching ShipCode.

Use Seed dev-loop skills in the Skills view, or run shipcode skills seed from a target repo, to materialize the curated dev-loop skills as skills/<skill-name>/.... Both paths write the ShipCode profile of the public shipshitdev/skills dev-loop bundle, including writing-prds, writing-plans, prd-quality-gate, executing-plans, setup-agent-routing, gh-project-board, qa-reviewer, feature-intake, and task-prd-creator. Existing files are skipped unless the CLI is run with --force.

Editing flow

  1. Open Skills from the sidebar
  2. Pick a phase skill from the left rail
  3. Edit the markdown on the right
  4. Save — validates required {{SLOT}} placeholders and writes the selected global or project override

Changes take effect on the next pipeline run. In-flight runs keep the skill they started with.

Use Reset to bundled default to delete the selected override and fall back to the next tier.

  • Pipeline Overview — which phase uses which skill
  • WORKFLOW.md — per-repo prompt template that takes priority over skill prompts when present
  • Configuration — agent labels that select which executor consumes the execute skill
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