Overview

@tanstack/intent is a CLI for shipping and consuming Agent Skills as package artifacts.

Skills are markdown documents that teach AI coding agents how to use your library correctly. Intent versions them with your releases and ships them inside npm packages. It discovers skills from your project and workspace dependencies, then helps agents load them when working on matching tasks.

What Intent does#

Intent provides tooling for two workflows:

For consumers:

• Discover skills from your project and workspace dependencies

• Control which packages' skills are surfaced with an allowlist

• Add lightweight skill loading guidance to your agent config

• Add hook enforcement for agents that support blocking lifecycle hooks

• Keep skills synchronized with library versions

  For maintainers (library teams):

• Scaffold skills through AI-assisted domain discovery

• Validate SKILL.md format and packaging

• Ship skills in the same release pipeline as code

• Track staleness when source docs change

How it works#

Discovery and installation#

Examples use npx for npm projects. In pnpm, Yarn, or Bun projects, use the matching runner:

npx @tanstack/intent@latest list

Scans the current project's installed dependencies for intent-enabled packages, including node_modules, workspace dependencies, and Yarn PnP projects without node_modules. You can narrow which packages are surfaced with package.json#intent.skills. See the Trust model and Configuration for how the allowlist works. Global package scanning is explicit; pass --global to include global packages or --global-only to ignore local packages. When both local and global packages are scanned, local packages take precedence.

npx @tanstack/intent@latest install

Creates or updates lightweight intent-skills guidance in your config files (AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules, etc.). Existing guidance is updated in place; otherwise AGENTS.md is the default target. Pass --map to opt in to explicit task-to-skill mappings.

npx @tanstack/intent@latest hooks install

Installs hook enforcement for supported agents. Project-scoped hooks are available for Claude Code and Codex. GitHub Copilot CLI project guidance can live in .github/copilot-instructions.md, while blocking hooks are user-scoped. Cursor and generic AGENTS.md agents use guidance only.

npx @tanstack/intent@latest load @tanstack/query#fetching

Loads the matching SKILL.md content for the installed package version. Pass --path when you need the resolved skill file path for debugging.

Scaffolding and validation#

npx @tanstack/intent@latest scaffold

Guides your agent through domain discovery, tree generation, and skill authoring with interactive maintainer interviews.

npx @tanstack/intent@latest validate

Enforces SKILL.md format rules and packaging requirements before publish.

Staleness tracking#

npx @tanstack/intent@latest stale

Detects when skills reference outdated source documentation or library versions.