Show HN: Sx – an open-source package manager for AI skills, MCPs, and commands

garettmd•about 2 hours ago

How does one pronounce this tool

detkin•about 1 hour ago

lol, just s ... x, the two letters.

We wanted something short and easy to remember

gchamonlive•about 1 hour ago

It's like in "essex" but I fear those more adventurous will short it out at the first "e".

maxdo•about 3 hours ago

why this do not belong to git, and does not go with release cycle.

With bigger autonomy, I'd like my skill be tight to my release in prod/commit sha for dev, to figure out what version caused harm/bug. What is the motivation to decouple and make it a separate thing?

maxdo•about 3 hours ago

with git, you even have git blame and everything else that makes it nice, once you merge it everyone else got access to it, with exception to local branch, which is a gray area, you can argue you want to lock the skill version to your code.

detkin•about 2 hours ago

The sx vault also stores things in git, I agree that it's a pretty good medium for storage.

My main argument is that just using vanilla git where you store it in the directory that the AI coding agent expects means that you can't share across teams or orgs.

Also, not every kind of team is comfortable with git. How would you distribute these assets to a Marketing team?

detkin•about 4 hours ago

Hi HN — I'm one of the maintainers.

The short version: sx treats skills, MCP server configs, slash commands, agents, hooks, and rule files as versioned packages. You define them once, push them to a vault (a local folder, a git repo, or our hosted backend), and install them where they belong. There's a lockfile so installs are reproducible, scope levels for org / team / repo / individual, and the CLI translates the same asset into the format each AI client expects.

Supported clients today: Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Cline, Codex, Gemini (CLI / VS Code / JetBrains / Android Studio), Kiro, claude.ai, chatgpt.com. The last two are what let non-engineering teams (marketing, legal, ops) use the same primitive instead of being locked out of the AI-assets ecosystem.

The thing I'd most like feedback on is whether the scope model is the right shape. Org → team → repo → path → individual is what's emerged from talking to ~60 teams over the last six months, but I expect bigger orgs will surface scopes we haven't modeled (sub-team, environment, etc.).

Why this and not just plugins / vendor marketplaces? Claude Code plugins are real and a good step up over raw git-checked-in CLAUDE.md files. The limitations show up at scale: each plugin is scoped to its publishing repo, so teams duplicate skills across plugins, and you're still locked to a single vendor's client. Full writeup with the technical details: https://www.sleuth.io/post/there-s-an-npm-shaped-hole-in-the...

guilhermecgs•about 1 hour ago

not sure if this premise is valid. In most cases, skills (and other assets) are not independent of each other. Take gstack por example; it would be weird to install skill A without installing skill B. They work together.

So, it is true that some skills are independent, but not all. IN my company, we ship assets by domain and workflows (development, discovery, data science, etc)

detkin•about 1 hour ago

We added the idea of dependencies for exactly that reason. However, honestly, I've not see any usage of it in the wild. Seems like most folks are ok with either bundling them and calling it a day or not really worrying about it.

Very interesting about the domain and workflows. Do you think domain could map to a team or is it different?

At your company how are you shipping your assets? How do you do the domain and workflow grouping?

giancarlostoro•about 1 hour ago

Will there be support for importing other tools that have their own CLIs?

detkin•about 1 hour ago

Say more, what kind of tools are you thinking about?

The tool support is certainly one of the key pillars of the project so we're open to any tool additions that will help people get value from the project.

giancarlostoro•about 1 hour ago

I have a tool that I built in Go[0], so it has its own binary, would this help to facilitate helping people install those? I have seen tools coded in Rust and Go distributed by npm install and it always bothers me, especially with npm repeatedly being a hotbed of hacked accounts.

Tools that come to mind:

RTK (Rust Token Killer since googling the acronym yields terrible results, asking an LLM without spelling it out too)

Beads (what GuardRails was inspired by)

... and an endless list of tools people have made in place of making an MCP.

I too thought about having a "AI Package manager" just found the message I sent a friend several months back.

[0]: https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails

big-chungus4•about 2 hours ago

seven

Show HN: Sx – an open-source package manager for AI skills, MCPs, and commands

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