Skills & Custom Commands as Cross-CLI Capability

~12 min · skills, custom-commands, cross-tool, portability

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Write once, run wherever your CLI is

The Agent Skills standard makes Skills CLI-agnostic. A Skill written for Claude Code is a Skill in Codex and Gemini — same frontmatter, same body, same paths:. Custom slash commands (.claude/commands/, .codex/commands/, .gemini/commands/) are simpler and CLI-specific, but the Skills standard subsumes them: write a Skill instead, get cross-CLI portability.

The team move: maintain Skills in a single repo (yours or shared). Each developer's CLI loads them via local config. Updates propagate via git pull. The same audit on the same input produces the same output regardless of which CLI is in front of which developer.

Code

One Skill, three CLIs·bash

# Maintain Skills in one repo
~/work/team-skills/
├── pr-summary/
│   └── SKILL.md
├── security-audit/
│   ├── SKILL.md
│   └── checklists/owasp-top10.md
└── changelog-writer/
    └── SKILL.md

# Each developer symlinks where their CLI looks
ln -s ~/work/team-skills/pr-summary    ~/.claude/skills/pr-summary
ln -s ~/work/team-skills/pr-summary    ~/.codex/skills/pr-summary
ln -s ~/work/team-skills/pr-summary    ~/.gemini/skills/pr-summary

Custom commands → Skills·markdown

# Yesterday: .claude/commands/review.md (Claude-only)
Review $ARGUMENTS for ...

# Today: ~/team-skills/review/SKILL.md (cross-CLI)
---
name: review
description: Code review against team standards
invocation: explicit
arguments:
  - name: target
    required: true
---
Review {{target}} for ...

External links

Agent Skills standard

Exercise

Take one custom command from your CLI of choice and convert it to a Skill. Symlink the Skill into the other CLIs you use. Run it via /name in each. Confirm output parity.

Progress

Progress is local-only — sign in to sync across devices.

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