SKILL.md
Repo Tour
A guided walkthrough of an unfamiliar GitHub repo. Output a 5-section markdown report so the reader can decide what it does, how it's built, where to start reading, what's active right now, and what to watch out for.
Steps
- Identify the repo. Parse
owner/namefrom the user query. If the user gave
only a name, ask once for the owner. If they gave a URL, strip to owner/name.
- Read the README. Call the GitHub MCP tool to fetch
README.mdfrom the
default branch. This is the single highest-value read — do it first.
- Map the top-level structure. List the contents of the root directory.
Note presence of: src/, lib/, app/, pkg/, cmd/, internal/, tests/, docs/, examples/, scripts/. Their absence is also a signal.
- Read the build/config manifest. Whichever exists, pick the most authoritative:
- pyproject.toml / setup.py / requirements.txt (Python) - package.json (JS/TS) - Cargo.toml (Rust) - go.mod (Go) - Gemfile (Ruby) - pom.xml / build.gradle (JVM)
Extract: name, version, declared dependencies (top 5–10 only), entry points / scripts.
- Find entry points. Look for
main.,index.,cli.*,main.py,
files referenced under [project.scripts] / "bin" / "main" in the manifest. Read one entry-point file end-to-end.
- Sample recent activity. Fetch:
- The 5 most recent merged pull requests. - The 5 most recent open issues.
Skim titles and short bodies. Look for themes (refactor in progress, breaking change brewing, frequently reported bug, large unmerged PR).
- Synthesize the report. Output exactly five sections in markdown:
``` ## What it does 2–3 sentences. Plain language. No marketing copy.
## How it's built Language, frameworks, top dependencies, notable architecture choices.
## Where to start reading 1–3 file paths a new contributor should open first, with one sentence each.
## What's active Themes from recent PRs and open issues. Surface anything unusual.
## What to watch Risks, gotchas, deprecated paths, pinned issues, unfinished refactors. ```
Stopping rules
- If the README alone answers the user's question, stop after step 2 and report.
- Don't recursively read every file. Sample, don't crawl.
- Hard ceiling: at most ~10 GitHub MCP tool calls per tour. Quality over coverage.
Tips
- If a directory listing is huge (>50 entries), only read the first page.
- If a file is huge (>1k lines), read just the first ~100 lines.
- Prefer
search_codeover deep traversal when looking for a specific symbol.