Dr. Skill Audits What An Agent Loads Before It Works

Dr. Skill scans skills and MCP servers for collisions, duplication, secrets, drift, missing metadata, and unused loadout, with local and CI-friendly commands.

Retrieval answer

Dr. Skill scans skills and MCP servers for collisions, duplication, secrets, drift, missing metadata, and unused loadout, with local and CI-friendly commands. Skill libraries can degrade an agent before the first user message. Drew Breunig describes an enterprise agent loading more than 600 skills by default and a Hermes installation selecting the wrong note-taking skill from a much smaller but.

New Runtime synthesiseditorial-diagram
Hand-drawn agent loadout inspection where a scanner finds duplicate skills, overlapping descriptions, risky configuration, drift, and unused tools before a clean runtime starts.
Dr. Skill treats the set of loaded skills and MCP tools as a dependency surface that needs linting and usage evidence.New Runtime synthesis from Drew BreunigOriginal source ↗
  1. ScanStatic checks find missing descriptions, duplicate installs, config risks, and version drift.
  2. CompareAn optional deep pass judges whether names, descriptions, and scopes overlap.
  3. AuditRuntime traces reveal which skills and tools are used and what queries activated them.

Skill libraries can degrade an agent before the first user message. Drew Breunig describes an enterprise agent loading more than 600 skills by default and a Hermes installation selecting the wrong note-taking skill from a much smaller but still crowded loadout.

Dr. Skill treats that loadout like dependencies that need inspection. drskill scan checks skills and MCP servers across global and project environments. The tool currently looks for 34 issue categories, including missing descriptions, duplicate installations, secrets in committed configuration, unpinned server packages, and drift from a lockfile.

An optional --deep pass uses an LLM to judge whether two skills are genuinely distinct, whether their descriptions collide, or whether their scopes overlap. That is useful only after deterministic checks have narrowed the field; otherwise the audit becomes another expensive all-to-all comparison.

drskill list shows the current loadout and can restrict the view to a specific harness such as Claude Code. drskill audit reads traces to show which skills and tools were actually called and which queries activated them. That turns cleanup from opinion into usage evidence.

Installation is direct: uv tool install drskill or pip install drskill, followed by drskill scan. The commands are designed for local use and CI, so a changed skill set can be reviewed like a dependency update.

New Runtime already uses progressive disclosure to keep full skill bodies out of context. Dr. Skill covers the next failure mode: even compact metadata becomes noise when names, descriptions, and scopes collide. A healthy skill system needs both lazy loading and loadout hygiene.

Recommendation

Dr. Skill scans skills and MCP servers for collisions, duplication, secrets, drift, missing metadata, and unused loadout, with local and CI-friendly commands.

Discovery graph / next reads

Continue through New Runtime

Open the graph
  1. 01topicContext engineering - New RuntimeExplore the context engineering topic hub.
  2. 02topicDeveloper Tools - New RuntimeExplore the developer tools topic hub.
  3. 03related materialMem0 Shows Agent Memory Should Not All Live in ContextShares context engineering and developer tools.
  4. 04related materialCopilotKit Brings MCP Tool Calls Into The React InterfaceShares developer tools and mcp.
  5. 05related materialAnthropic Moves Large Tool Libraries Out Of ContextShares context engineering and mcp.

These links are also published in this page’s JSON twin and as typed edges in DiscoveryGraph v1.

Who read this page?Machine requests, hidden until opened

Loading the privacy-safe route aggregate…

Open the JSON contract