Overview

@tanstack/intent is a CLI for library maintainers to generate, validate, and ship Agent Skills alongside their npm packages.

Your docs are good. Your types are solid. Your agent still gets it wrong.

Docs target humans who browse. Types check individual API calls but can't encode intent. Training data snapshots the ecosystem as it was, mixing versions with no way to tell which applies. Once a breaking change ships, models develop a permanent split-brain — training data contains both versions forever with no way to disambiguate.

The ecosystem already moves toward agent-readable knowledge — Cursor rules, CLAUDE.md files, skills directories. But delivery is stuck in copy-paste: hunt for a community-maintained rules file, paste it into your config, repeat for every tool. No versioning, no update path, no staleness signal.

A skill is a short, versioned document that tells agents how to use a specific capability of your library — correct patterns, common mistakes, and when to apply them. Skills ship inside your npm package and travel with the tool via npm update — not the model's training cutoff, not community-maintained rules files, not prompt snippets in READMEs. Versioned knowledge the maintainer owns, updated when the package updates.

Each skill declares its source docs. When those docs change, the CLI flags the skill for review. One source of truth, one derived artifact that stays in sync.

The Agent Skills spec is an open standard already adopted by VS Code, GitHub Copilot, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, Claude Code, Goose, Amp, and others.

Set up skill-to-task mappings in your project's agent config files (CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules, etc.):

npx @tanstack/intent install

No per-library setup. No hunting for rules files. Install the package, run npx @tanstack/intent install, and the agent understands the tool. Update the package, and skills update too.

List available skills from installed packages:

npx @tanstack/intent list

Generate skills for your library by telling your AI coding agent to run:

npx @tanstack/intent scaffold

This walks the agent through domain discovery, skill tree generation, and skill creation — one step at a time with your review at each stage.

Validate your skill files:

npx @tanstack/intent validate

Check for skills that have fallen behind their sources:

npx @tanstack/intent stale

Copy CI workflow templates into your repo so validation and staleness checks run on every push:

npx @tanstack/intent setup-github-actions

The real risk with any derived artifact is staleness. npx @tanstack/intent stale flags skills whose source docs have changed, and CI templates catch drift before it ships.

The feedback loop runs both directions. npx @tanstack/intent feedback lets users submit structured reports when a skill produces wrong output — which skill, which version, what broke. That context flows back to the maintainer, and the fix ships to everyone on the next npm update. Every support interaction produces an artifact that prevents the same class of problem for all future users — not just the one who reported it.