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Install the packaged Kast skill

The packaged Kast skill is a repository-local directory that tells your LLM agent how to use Kast. Installing it copies the skill files into your workspace and writes a .kast-version marker so the same CLI version skips reinstallation.

Prerequisites

Before you install the skill, you need the Kast CLI installed on your machine. If you haven't done that yet, follow the install guide.

Install the skill

From the workspace root, run the following command to install the skill.

  1. Run the install command:

    Install the skill
    kast install skill

  2. Let the command choose the default target directory. It picks from the directories already present in your workspace:

    • .agents/skills/kast
    • .github/skills/kast
    • .claude/skills/kast

  3. Verify the install by checking for the .kast-version file in the target directory. If the same CLI version was already installed, the JSON result shows skipped: true.

Force a reinstall

If you need to replace an existing install, pass --yes=true to skip the confirmation prompt. If you need a non-default target directory, pass --target-dir:

Force reinstall to a custom path
kast install skill --target-dir=/absolute/path/to/skills --yes=true

What the skill contains

The installed skill directory includes:

  • SKILL.md — the agent-facing instruction file that describes the portable Kast workflow and when to trigger it
  • evals/evals.json — richer transcript-derived eval prompts for measuring routing, recovery, and semantic persistence
  • references/wrapper-openapi.yaml — OpenAPI specification for the kast skill subcommand surface
  • references/quickstart.md — compact request snippets and recovery guidance for bootstrap and navigation
  • references/routing-improvement.md — the playbook for mining transcripts and logs into routing evals
  • evals/routing.json — sanitized routing prompts used to keep real-world trigger coverage stable
  • scripts/resolve-kast.sh — a portable helper that resolves the Kast binary without repo-local hook paths
  • scripts/kast-session-start.sh — a compatibility helper that prints an export KAST_CLI_PATH=... fragment
  • scripts/build-routing-corpus.py — builds sanitized routing cases and promotion candidates from session exports and process logs

GitHub Copilot custom agents are a separate surface. If you want Copilot-specific personas or tool restrictions, keep those in .github/agents/*.md; they are not part of the portable Agent Skills bundle.

How agents locate the Kast binary

The packaged skill assumes a companion hook sets KAST_CLI_PATH to an absolute path to the Kast binary before the skill runs. Every command documented in SKILL.md is then invoked as "$KAST_CLI_PATH" skill <command> <json>.

Use .github/hooks/resolve-kast-cli-path.sh in your harness to encode the standard resolution flow (existing KAST_CLI_PATH, then kast on $PATH, then local build/distribution outputs). For example:

export KAST_CLI_PATH="$(bash .github/hooks/resolve-kast-cli-path.sh)"

If you are operating outside the repo hook environment, the installed skill also includes portable helpers:

Use the installed compatibility helpers
eval "$(bash .agents/skills/kast/scripts/kast-session-start.sh)"
python3 .agents/skills/kast/scripts/build-routing-corpus.py --help

Next steps