Auto-Skill Curator

Problem

Qwen Code can extract reusable project skills from tool-heavy conversations, but accepted auto-skills only accumulate. The existing review agent can create or update source: auto-skill skills and is explicitly forbidden from deleting them. Path gating and skills.disabled reduce prompt noise but do not maintain the on-disk library.

Scope

Add a small, deterministic lifecycle manager for project auto-skills:

• Track successful invocations of project skills whose directory starts with auto-skill- and whose frontmatter contains source: auto-skill.
• Mark a managed skill stale after 30 days without activity.
• Archive it after 90 days without activity by moving its whole directory out of .qwen/skills/ into .qwen/archived-skills/.
• Allow individual managed skills to be pinned out of automatic transitions.
• Run the deterministic pass at most once every 7 days during configuration initialization when Auto Skill is enabled and the workspace is trusted.
• Expose /curator, /curator status, /curator run [--dry-run], and /curator pin|unpin|restore <directory> in interactive, non-interactive, and ACP command surfaces.

This first version does not use an LLM, consolidate overlapping skills, manage personal/bundled/extension/learned/hand-authored skills, permanently delete anything, or introduce configurable thresholds.

Ownership and persistence

The curator is resolved only from Config.getProjectRoot(). Its state lives at <project>/.qwen/skill-curator.json, and archived packages live at <project>/.qwen/archived-skills/. There is no fallback to the process's primary workspace, home directory, or another active session. This keeps daemon and multi-workspace sessions isolated.

State is keyed by the auto-skill directory name because that is the unit moved to and from the archive. Each record stores the frontmatter skill name, first-seen time, last successful use, use count, lifecycle state, pin state, and optional archive time. Writes are serialized with a cross-process lock and committed atomically.

Corrupt state is a hard, non-mutating failure. The curator must not infer that missing usage means inactivity when its persisted evidence cannot be read.

Eligibility and safety

A directory is curator-managed only when every condition holds:

1. It is a direct, non-symlink directory under the project skills root.
2. Its name starts with auto-skill-.
3. It contains a regular, non-symlink SKILL.md.
4. The opening YAML frontmatter contains exactly source: auto-skill.

This double marker prevents the curator from moving hand-authored, learned, extension, bundled, personal, malformed, or symlinked content. Archive and restore never overwrite an existing skill. A destination collision skips only that package so unrelated maintenance can continue. Archived directory names are shown as reserved in the review prompt and rejected by its write permission guard, while confirmation staging still snapshots active skills only. If state persistence fails after moves, the pass attempts to move every package back before surfacing the error.

Read-only status and dry-run previews remain available in safe mode and untrusted workspaces. Applying a maintenance pass, pinning, unpinning, and restoring require a trusted workspace outside safe mode.

Activity and transitions

A successful Skill tool or direct skill slash-command invocation updates an eligible auto-skill record best-effort, even while automatic skill generation is disabled. This keeps observed activity independent from the switch that controls generation and scheduled maintenance. Failed, skill-disabled, or hook-blocked invocations do not count.

For a live skill, activity is the newest of:

• the persisted last successful invocation;
• the persisted first-seen time;
• the persisted restore time; and
• the skill manifest modification time.

Including modification time prevents a recently improved skill from being archived merely because it has not yet been invoked again.

The first observation of each eligible skill seeds firstSeenAt = now rather than inferring inactivity from an old filesystem timestamp. The first automatic observation also seeds lastRunAt, then waits a full 7-day interval. Explicit /curator run bypasses the interval but preserves per-skill first-sight grace; --dry-run reports the same seeding and transition candidates without moving directories or changing state. Pinned records bypass stale and archive transitions until explicitly unpinned.

Integration points

• Config.initialize: performs the due deterministic pass before SkillManager scans the filesystem.
• SkillTool: records a successful managed-skill invocation.
• SkillCommandLoader and the interactive/non-interactive command processors: record successful direct slash-command invocations; ACP reuses the non-interactive processor.
• SkillManager: its existing refresh path is used after manual archive or restore so the model and slash-command surfaces immediately match disk.
• BuiltinCommandLoader: publishes the new /curator command.

No other consumer should write curator state or move managed skill packages.

Verification

Unit tests cover eligibility, first-run seeding, stale/archive thresholds, dry-run non-mutation, recent-use protection, recently-modified protection, corrupt-state fail-closed behavior, collision handling, restoration, and the command surface. Existing Skill tool tests verify that only successful loads record usage. Build and typecheck cover the cross-package export and command registration.