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tapes

Skills

Tapes can extract reusable patterns from derived session transcripts with an LLM, store them under ~/.tapes/skills/, and sync them into agent skill directories.

A generated transcript follows the main conversation spine: turn-level prompts and responses from traces/spans, excluding harness shadow calls such as permission checks, title generation, and injected context.

All three commands live in the client, tapesctl. generate reads session data from the read API; list and sync touch no server at all.

Generate

Section titled “Generate”

A name in kebab-case is required:

Terminal window
tapesctl skill generate <session-id> --name debug-react-hooks

Use multiple session IDs, or find matching sessions through span search:

Terminal window
tapesctl skill generate <session-a> <session-b> --name retry-patterns
tapesctl skill generate --search "gum glow charm" \
  --search-top 3 --name charm-cli-patterns

Sessions named positionally take priority over --search.

Other useful controls are:

Terminal window
tapesctl skill generate <session-id> --name morning-work \
  --since 2026-02-17 --until 2026-02-17T17:00:00Z \
  --type workflow --preview

Skill types are workflow, domain-knowledge, and prompt-template.

Two servers are involved and they are not the same one. --tapes-url addresses the read API that supplies the transcript. --provider, --model, and --api-key address the LLM that does the extraction:

Provider Default model Key read from Key required
openai (default) gpt-4o-mini OPENAI_API_KEY yes
anthropic claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 ANTHROPIC_API_KEY yes
ollama llama3.2 either, if set no

Prefer the environment variable over --api-key: a key passed on the command line is visible in the process list and in shell history for as long as the command runs.

List

Section titled “List”
Terminal window
tapesctl skill list
tapesctl skill list --type workflow

Sync

Section titled “Sync”

Installing a skill into an agent’s skills directory is a local file copy with no server involved.

By default, sync writes to the global, agent-neutral ~/.agents/skills/:

Terminal window
tapesctl skill sync debug-react-hooks

Choose project-local or Claude Code paths explicitly:

Terminal window
tapesctl skill sync debug-react-hooks --local             # .agents/skills/
tapesctl skill sync debug-react-hooks --claude            # ~/.claude/skills/
tapesctl skill sync debug-react-hooks --claude --local    # .claude/skills/
tapesctl skill sync debug-react-hooks --dry-run

Generated skills are files you can inspect and version like other agent instructions. Preview generation and use --dry-run before syncing when the source session contains project-specific assumptions.