jgs-reference-skill

Turn a vetted authoritative source (a standard, handbook, guidebook, or framework) into a licence-clean, citable knowledge pack your agent loads on demand.

A fork of book-to-skill, repositioned from personal study skills to publishable reference oracles: it vets the source's licence first and refuses to package anything it cannot redistribute.

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§01 · What it is

A reference oracle, not study notes

A reference pack answers "what does this body of knowledge say about X?" from the actual source: grounded, never hallucinated, never a photocopy. It keeps book-to-skill's progressive-disclosure shape (a small always-loaded SKILL.md plus on-demand chapters) and adds the provenance, licence, and verification rigour that a published pack needs.

§02 · The pipeline

Vet first, verify last

vet_source

Classify the licence: Tier 1/2/3 or Excluded. Paywalled / all-rights-reserved sources are refused and routed to a citation-only signpost.

extract

Vendored book-to-skill engine turns PDF/EPUB/DOCX/HTML/RTF into clean text + metadata.

outline

Deterministic table of contents with exact char/line offsets, so chapters are sliced precisely, not by ad-hoc grep.

build_pack

Vet-gated scaffold writes PACK.yaml provenance and a per-pack LICENSE carrying the source's terms.

generate

Citation-grounded chapters plus glossary, patterns, cheatsheet, and the pack's own SKILL.md index.

verify

Three gates: no verbatim overlap, valid structure + tier, and every topic-index route grounded in its chapter.

§03 · What makes it different

The rigour book-to-skill leaves out

Licence-vet gate

Tier 1/2/3/Excluded classification before extraction. An Excluded source is a hard stop: it becomes a signpost, never a pack.

Provenance + per-pack licence

PACK.yaml records title, publisher, version, licence, tier, and NC/SA flags; each pack ships the source's own LICENSE.

Verbatim-overlap detector

N-gram shingling flags any run lifted from the source: a licence-safety and quality gate, enforced, not just advised.

Index-truth check

Every topic-index route is verified to be grounded in the chapter it points to, so the pack routes queries honestly.

§04 · Supported agents

One skill, many hosts

Native

Claude Code, OpenClaw, GitHub Copilot CLI: the skill folder (tools included) is copied unchanged.

Transform

Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor: the spec is rendered into the agent's prompt/command format. Tools run from a local clone.

Open format

Built on the agentskills.io SKILL.md standard, so the same source installs everywhere via install.py.

§05 · Install

Clone and install

# Clone, then install into your agent (Claude Code by default)
git clone https://github.com/jgsystemsconsulting/jgs-reference-skill
cd jgs-reference-skill
python install.py                 # Claude Code
python install.py --agent all     # every user-global agent
python install.py --list-agents   # show each target + format

Restart your agent and run /jgs-reference-skill. Requires Python 3.9+. The tooling is MIT, but packs you generate carry their source's licence; read the vetting rubric before packaging anything.

§06 · Use it

Drive it in plain language

Once installed, restart your agent and talk to the skill by name. Give it the source's title, publisher, and licence; it vets the licence first and refuses anything it cannot redistribute, routing Excluded sources to a citation-only signpost.

# load the generator spec
/jgs-reference-skill
# build a pack from a vetted source
/jgs-reference-skill build a pack from the NASA SE Handbook
# vet a source before committing to it
/jgs-reference-skill vet "SysML" published by the Object Management Group
# fold a new document into an existing pack
/jgs-reference-skill add NIST SP 800-160 Vol 2 to my nist-sse pack

The skill runs the whole pipeline for you: vet, extract, outline, scaffold, generate, and the three verification gates. Prefer to run the tools by hand? Every step is a stdlib script with a --self-check. See the usage guide for the full reference.