dont-reinvent - Teach your agent to acquire capabilities on its own - find existing skills before building one.

Mirrored in three places, same version everywhere: Hugging Face (you are here) · GitLab · GitHub

Get the files - GitLab is the most reliable plain-git route:

git clone https://gitlab.com/LucioLiu/dont-reinvent.git

# or from this page
hf download LucioLiu/dont-reinvent --repo-type dataset --local-dir ./dont-reinvent

Then drop the folder into your agent's skills directory - ~/.claude/skills/dont-reinvent/ for Claude Code, ~/.agents/skills/dont-reinvent/ for Codex, or your client's equivalent.

Note: links to github.com inside the text below point to the GitHub mirror; if one does not resolve, use the GitLab mirror above - it carries the same content.

Licence: PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 - the LICENSE file in this repo is authoritative.

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English | 简体中文

dont-reinvent · find the wheel before you build one 🎯

Teach an agent to acquire capabilities on its own — find existing skills before building one.

What it solves

An agent without this skill has two reactions to a capability it lacks: say "I can't do that," or build it from scratch. But most of the capabilities you need already exist as a skill somewhere (deck generation, document processing, social publishing…).

Install it, and the agent runs a fixed five-step routine whenever it hits a capability gap:

1. Check the team's own shelf first — reuse what's already been sedimented before reaching for anything new.
2. Search for an existing wheel — a fixed channel list to copy from: gh skill search, aggregator sites (skillsmp.com and similar), the official anthropics/skills source, curated awesome lists, GitHub code search path:**/SKILL.md.
3. Found a good one → download, register, install (registration must include source + update method, or it's an orphaned version nobody recognizes three months from now).
4. Genuinely nothing exists → build it yourself (only after confirming the first two steps came up empty).
5. A good method → sediment it into a skill (if you built it and will likely reuse it, shelve it on the spot).

Also covers three placement layers (user-level vs single-agent-level — attention isolation, so Role A's skills don't pollute Role B's session), freedom to adapt (a skill serves its user, not its author — change it if it doesn't fit), and four pitfalls (including "read a download all the way through before installing it, to guard against prompt injection").

Honest positioning: this repo ships the capability-acquisition discipline itself — it does not ship a real provider, downloader, or installer, and the machine-readable provider / preview / provenance JSON Schemas are not published here yet (SKILL.md's six-dimension comparison and its install/verify steps are the operative contract in the meantime). When the current harness lacks that runtime capability, the only honest output is a manual-review plan; the documented steps must never be reported as an actual search, download, or install having happened.

Install

Option 1 · GitHub CLI (recommended, auto-updating)

gh skill install LucioLiu/dont-reinvent dont-reinvent --agent claude-code --scope user

Option 2 · Manual: copy SKILL.md to ~/.claude/skills/dont-reinvent/SKILL.md (no update channel — re-copy by hand when a new version ships). Chinese-speaking users should copy SKILL.zh-CN.md instead and rename it to SKILL.md locally.

Other tools: SKILL.md is a plain, portable markdown guide — feed it straight to Cursor / Codex / any LLM.

Why it should be your agent's first building block

It's the "entry point to every other capability" — install it once and your agent starts finding, installing, and sedimenting capabilities on its own, so you stop hunting down skills for it one at a time.

Part of the capability-block architecture behind the Nuwa digital-employee framework — more blocks live in that repo (not in this folder).

Companion blocks (sibling skills, take what you need)

• token-saver — once you've found and installed a wheel, pick a model tier before dispatching a subagent; saves 70-90% of tokens on execution-type work.
• handoff-protocol — the full handoff discipline for multi-agent work delegation.

Version & updates

Current version 1.4.0 (see .claude-plugin/plugin.json). Updates are always published to this repo; gh skill install users run gh skill update dont-reinvent to upgrade, manual-copy users should revisit this page and compare version numbers.

Verification boundary

The offline structural runner, the JSON Schemas it validates, and the SK-DR-P-001 / SK-DR-N-001 case bundles are not published in this repository yet — don't expect a tests directory in what you installed. Nothing here has been marked PASS for agent-semantic behavior: those cases stay not-run until an independent agent actually runs them and leaves a receipt.

License

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 — free for personal and non-commercial use.

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Both language editions are maintained in sync. If they ever diverge, the Chinese edition is authoritative — please open an issue if you spot one.