Answered by something
you have never read.

A skill is a small document that tells Claude how to do a particular kind of work. Writing one is easy, which is the problem: they are easy to write, easy to install and easy to forget. Six months on, a machine carries a set of them that nobody has ever looked at as a set.

Three ways a skill goes dark

• It is read, never shown. A skill does its work at the moment it is loaded. Nothing puts it in front of you, so the only copy you have seen is the one you typed.
• It arrived with something else. Install a plugin and its skills come too. They are as live as the ones you wrote and you never chose their words.
• It lives where nobody browses. Skills sit in a configuration directory under your home folder, a place you open to fix something and otherwise never visit.

The result is quiet rather than dramatic. Nothing breaks. You simply lose the ability to answer plain questions about your own setup: what is on this machine, what does it still say, which of it did I write.

What this does about it

Skills Viewer finds every skill on the machine and puts the whole set in one list, with the one you pick rendered beside it. Your own skills and the ones that came with a plugin are separated under a heading each. A skill whose frontmatter will not parse is still listed, with the failure shown, because a skill you cannot read is exactly the one worth knowing about.

It reads and nothing else. It never writes to a skill, which is enforced by a structural test that reads the whole program and fails the build if any part of it but the settings file calls a writing operation. When you want to change something it hands the document to the editor you chose. Leave to edit, come back, then the library is re-read with your place kept.

What it is not

It is not an editor, not a manager and not a store. It does not rank your skills, score them or suggest new ones. It shows you what you already have, which is the part that was missing.