links: site | repo | project page
SkillPass search needed a second mode.
Keyword search is still useful when you know the exact thing you want: “vite”, “docker”, “review”, “docs”. But agent skills are often discovered by intent, not by name. Someone might search for “help me write better articles” and want copywriting, content strategy, editorial workflow, or writing-skills results even if those exact words are not in every title.
This pass added two pieces to the directory:
- a Featured tab with a curated default order
- an AI search mode beside keyword search
The Featured tab is the simple editorial layer. It lets the homepage lead with the strongest workflow packs and generally useful skills without changing what “latest” means. Latest is still latest. Featured is the front shelf.
The AI search side is intentionally boring in the good way. It does not ask an LLM to decide what a skill is. SkillPass builds a search document from the public listing copy, embeds it with Voyage, stores the vector in pgvector, and does cosine search when someone chooses AI mode. The query path returns the same public skill summaries as the normal directory, just ordered by semantic relevance.
That shape matters because the directory is still about inspection, not magic. Semantic search can help someone find the right passport faster, but it should not become an opaque recommendation engine. The skill page still shows source, permissions, validation status, risk, findings, and install details before anything reaches your machine.
There was one API lesson hiding in the Featured work too: the published CLI was strict-parsing directory responses, so adding a harmless new field would have broken installed clients. The fix was to carry ranking through server-side row order instead of expanding the payload. That is the kind of boring compatibility detail you only catch once a side project has real users and a real CLI.
The end result is a directory that feels less like a list and more like a tool: curated when you are browsing, semantic when you are searching, and still skeptical when you are about to install.