Logic, Inc. has open-sourced Homecrew, a command-line tool that treats AI agent skills like software packages. Install once, copy to every supported coding agent on your machine—no more manually syncing prompts across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, Goose, and the rest. The project dropped on Hacker News yesterday with version 0.8.1 available for macOS 13+.

The Problem Homecrew Solves

Every team that uses AI coding agents accumulates skills—prompts, playbooks, conventions—that live scattered across gists, private notes, and individual engineers' laptops. When someone writes a great code-review skill or an onboarding playbook, it stays trapped where it was created. Homecrew turns those loose files into installable packages with dependency resolution, version pinning, and git-backed distribution.

Core Workflow: Tap, Install, Update

The tool centers on three concepts: taps (git repos full of skills), skills (directories containing a SKILL.md manifest), and agents (the coding tools that consume them). Run crew tap add @acme/skills to point at a shared repository—every skill inside becomes searchable. Then crew install founding-engineer copies the skill into every detected agent simultaneously. The crew update command refreshes taps and resolves refs to commit SHAs, while crew autoupdate enable sets up a launchd background job that runs updates every four hours.

Dependency Resolution and Meta-Skills

Skills can declare dependencies in their SKILL.md frontmatter using any reference the CLI accepts—bare names, git URLs with version pins, tap-qualified paths. Homecrew walks the dependency graph transitively before installing. The practical upshot: a single "team-baseline" meta-skill can pull in fourteen other skills—code review checklists, on-call playbooks, style guides—in one command. New engineers onboard by running crew install acme/team-baseline and they're caught up.

Safety First: Copies, Not Symlinks

Homecrew always copies files rather than symlinking. Each agent gets its own physical copy, which prevents breakage when agents resolve skills differently or users pin individual tools to older refs. The tool records a content hash in a .crew.json marker at install time and refuses to overwrite customized skills on re-install unless you pass --force. No post-install hooks execute anything—Homecrew is explicitly described as "a file copier" that leaves an auditable paper trail.

Private-by-Default Architecture

Taps clone using whatever git credentials already exist on the machine: SSH keys, personal access tokens, GitHub Enterprise hosts. Homecrew never phones home or uploads skills anywhere—there are no hosted registries, just plain git repos acting as package sources. Your private repo stays private.

Installation and Requirements

A single binary drops into ~/.local/bin/crew with skill data under ~/.crew/. The installer verifies signed release checksums before writing anything. Uninstall by deleting those two paths. Currently macOS-only because the autoupdate mechanism relies on launchd, though the team notes nothing in the core design is platform-specific.

Key Takeaways

  • One crew install syncs skills across every detected agent—no per-tool setup loops
  • Git repos become package registries; PRs review skill changes like any other code
  • Dependency graphs let meta-skills onboard new teammates in a single command
  • Local-edit protection prevents Homecrew from clobbering your customizations on update