The bce Agent Skills#

This directory holds bce packaged as Agent Skills — the folder-per-skill format (<skill-name>/SKILL.md, with YAML frontmatter naming and describing the skill) that Claude Code and other Agent-Skills consumers load on demand. Two skills ship here:

• bce/SKILL.md — the whole lifecycle: propose and review a blueprint, validate it, run it, prove it can go red, wire it as a gate, plus the honesty invariants that keep the result meaningful.
• skill-tuning/SKILL.md — the engine turned on this format itself: grade a skills/ tree against the skill-standard and drive it green. The gated half of that standard is a blueprint; the half the engine structurally cannot gate is a checklist, and the skill says which is which.

Both are a surface over the engine, exactly like everything in integrations/: they contain no conformance logic. Every command they teach is a real bce verb with real flags, and tests/skill-contract.test.ts fails the build if the skill ever names a verb or flag the CLI does not accept.

This directory is also held to the standard it publishes: .blueprints/skill-standard.blueprint.json gates skills/** on every run of the self-gate, and tests/skill-standard.test.ts runs the required-half checks that no blueprint clause can express. A standard whose author's own skills did not pass it would not be worth publishing.

Installing it#

The lowest-friction project path is bce onboard --harness agents|claude|cursor|codex. It installs both complete skill directories in the harness's repository scope while also wiring context, MCP, CI, and the advisory contract. The manual and plugin paths below remain useful when you want only the skills or a user-level installation.

As an OpenAI plugin#

The repository root is also a skills-only plugin for ChatGPT and Codex. Its plugin.json packages both skill directories without claiming that the local bce-mcp stdio process is a hosted MCP integration. Run npm run test:codex-plugin to check the archive and its negative controls. The same archive also passes the canonical validator from OpenAI's plugin-creator skill.

The public universal-directory submission is not live. There is no public listing URL or clean-account directory install to cite. The operator-owned materials and blockers are recorded in docs/launch/openai-plugin-submission.md. Project onboarding remains the verified installation path for the CLI and read-only MCP tools.

As a Claude Code plugin#

This repository is also a plugin marketplace: it carries .claude-plugin/marketplace.json offering one plugin, blueprint, whose source is the repository root (.claude-plugin/plugin.json). Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin is two lines, and updates arrive with /plugin update:

/plugin marketplace add blueprint-conformance/bce
/plugin install blueprint@bce

The skills then load as blueprint:bce and blueprint:skill-tuning. Both manifests are re-validated on every push — claude plugin validate . --strict, in ci.yml — so a stale skill path is a red build rather than a load failure in your session.

To try it from a local checkout without installing anything, load the directory for one session:

claude --plugin-dir /path/to/bce

As a plain skill directory#

A skill is also just a directory, and nothing above is required to use one. Put it where your assistant looks for skills:

# Claude Code, for one project
mkdir -p .claude/skills
cp -R path/to/bce/skills/bce .claude/skills/bce
cp -R path/to/bce/skills/skill-tuning .claude/skills/skill-tuning

# Claude Code, for every project on this machine
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -R path/to/bce/skills/bce ~/.claude/skills/bce
cp -R path/to/bce/skills/skill-tuning ~/.claude/skills/skill-tuning

Take either on its own — they are independent. Any other Agent-Skills consumer reads the same folder-per-skill layout; point it at skills/bce or skills/skill-tuning per its own documentation.

Copy the whole directory, not just SKILL.md: skill-tuning reads its references/ on demand, and a skill whose references are missing fails by finding nothing rather than by reporting it.

The skill drives the bce CLI, so the command has to be reachable. Install the exact provenance-backed public release in the target project:

npm view bce-engine@0.3.1 version dist.integrity
npm install --save-dev --save-exact bce-engine@0.3.1
npx --no-install bce demo

Never use a range or latest for a merge gate. The published package also contains skills/, prompts/, integration snippets, schemas, and onboarding docs, so copying a plain skill from node_modules/bce-engine/skills/ does not require a second checkout.

Skill, snippet, or MCP server?#

Three surfaces, three different jobs. They compose; they are not alternatives to each other.

The snippet is the standing done-check; the skill is the thing that gets a contract to exist in the first place.

Related reading#

• ../docs/quickstart.md — the offline RED to GREEN walkthrough, five minutes, no network beyond one install.
• ../docs/agent-loop.md — running the gate as an agent's done-check, per harness.
• ../docs/ai-first-review.md — bounded proposal, deterministic packet, authenticated decision, and attended landing.
• ../docs/onboarding.md — install and compose CLI, skill, context, MCP, CI, lifecycle, and evidence as one stack.
• ../spec/SPEC.md — the normative artifact model, taxonomy, scoring, and exit codes the skill's commands are grounded in.