# HappySkills, the package manager for AI agent skills

> My own product: a registry and CLI that gives AI agent skills what code has had for decades, dependencies, a lock file, sync and team sharing, all driven by talking to your agent.

- Client: Our product (AI developer tools)
- Role: Founder and engineer, Nicolas Dao
- Status: Live. Our products and research
- Capabilities: AI agents, Developer tools, Product, SaaS
- Web page: https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/happyskills/

## Outcomes

- A hosted registry and CLI for agent skills, live and used every day.
- Concepts the standard didn't have: dependencies between skills, a hash-checked lock file, three-way merge and kits.
- Works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other agents.

## The situation

Agent skills are how you teach an AI agent the way your company works. They're also just folders: copied between projects, edited in one place and not another, with no versions, no dependencies and no way for a team to share them properly. I hit that wall myself, with dozens of skills across every client project.

## What I built

HappySkills, a hosted registry and CLI that does for agent skills what npm did for JavaScript, without changing the skill format. Skills declare dependencies with version ranges. A lock file pins every version and hash, so a setup can be rebuilt exactly. Local edits are merged, not overwritten. Teams get private catalogs with roles and per-skill access. And you drive all of it by talking to your agent, because the CLI was designed for agents first.

I built it end to end, as a company of one with agentic programming: product, design, infrastructure, security, payments and the CLI. The full verdict, with how it compares to the alternatives, is in [The Stack](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/happyskills/index.md).

## Why it matters to you

HappySkills is the proof behind the claim: one senior engineer with agents can design, build and run a real product, not a prototype. It's also how I bring a company's know-how into its agents when I work with a team: as versioned skills, shared and kept in sync.

## Built with

- [HappySkills](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/happyskills/index.md): My default in The Stack
- [Claude Code](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/claude-code/index.md): My default in The Stack
- [Node.js (plain JavaScript)](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/nodejs-javascript/index.md): My default in The Stack
- [TypeScript](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/typescript/index.md): Skip in The Stack
- [Amazon Web Services (AWS)](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/aws/index.md): My default in The Stack
- Package management
- Semantic search
- Agent-first CLI

## Links

- [happyskills.ai](https://happyskills.ai)
- [Why I built HappySkills](https://happyskills.ai/blog/why-i-built-happyskills/)

## Related

- [switch-profile, open-source AWS account switching with SSO](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/switch-profile/index.md): a related project
- [Every project](https://cloudlesslabs.com/work/index.md)
- [How we work](https://cloudlesslabs.com/about/how-we-work/index.md)
- [Map of every Markdown file on cloudlesslabs.com, with what each one answers](https://ask.cloudlesslabs.com)