Pi Skill Palette

A command palette for Pi coding agent that lets you explicitly select skills to inject with your next message or pin as standing instructions.

/skill

Why

Agents don't always know when to read their skills. Instead of relying on automatic detection based on task context, this extension gives you direct control. Select a skill from the palette and it gets sent alongside your next message, or mark it as pinned instructions.

Install

pi install npm:pi-skill-palette

Restart pi to load the extension.

Compatibility

This package includes an Agent Plugins v1.0.0 plugin.json manifest for portable package metadata. Runtime behavior remains Pi-specific through package.json and index.ts. The package does not expose portable skills/ or mcp.json components.

Quick Start

1. Type /skill and press Enter
2. Start typing to fuzzy-filter skills
3. Use ↑/↓ to navigate, Enter to select
4. Send your message - the queued skill context is automatically included

You can queue up to three different skills. Run /skill again to add another skill. The queued skills appear in the footer and widget until consumed. Re-select a queued skill to unqueue it (with confirmation).

Pinned Skills

Add pinned: true to a skill's frontmatter when the skill should default to standing instructions from the palette:

---
name: my-skill
description: Brief description of what this skill does
pinned: true
---

Selecting that skill in /skill pins it until you remove it from the palette. Pinned skills are appended to the system prompt on each turn. The /skill:name slash-command path still loads skills one time ahead of the next prompt, even when pinned: true is present.

Multi-skill Commands

You can also load multiple skills with Pi's /skill: syntax:

/skill:typescript-code,/skill:react-best-practices build this component
/skill:typescript-code,react-best-practices,frontend-design build this component

The extension accepts up to three different skills. If you omit the prompt, the skills are queued for your next message. Autocomplete works as you type each /skill: segment, including comma-separated and repeated-prefix forms.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Key	Action
↑ / ↓	Navigate skills
Enter	Select / Remove skill
Esc	Cancel
Tab	Switch buttons (in confirmation dialog)
Y / N	Quick confirm/cancel unqueue

Skill Locations

The palette shows the skills already loaded by pi for the current session, including user skills, trusted project skills, configured skill paths, and installed package skills. This keeps the palette aligned with pi's own discovery, precedence, trust, and deduplication rules.

Each skill must provide YAML frontmatter:

---
name: my-skill
description: Brief description of what this skill does
---

# Skill Content

The actual skill instructions go here...

Theming

Customize colors by creating theme.json in the extension directory. Copy theme.example.json as a starting point:

cp theme.example.json theme.json

Theme values are ANSI SGR codes ("36" for cyan, "2;3" for dim+italic, "38;2;215;135;175" for RGB).

Property	Description
border	Box borders
title	Title text
selected	Selection indicator
selectedText	Selected item text
queued	Queued badge
searchIcon	Search icon
placeholder	Placeholder text
description	Skill descriptions
hint	Footer hints
confirm	Confirm button
cancel	Cancel button

How It Works

When you select a normal skill, it's queued in memory with visual indicators in the footer and widget. On your next message, all queued skill content is sent via the before_agent_start extension event as a custom message alongside your prompt. When a selected skill has pinned: true, it is kept in memory and appended to the system prompt on each turn until removed. The palette uses pi's loaded skill list, so skill precedence, trust checks, package resources, configured paths, and deduplication are handled by pi.

Limitations

• Use /reload or restart pi to pick up newly added skills
• Theme changes require a restart