Introduction

quay is a CLI and TUI for sharing skills — small Markdown + YAML packages that teach AI coding agents project conventions, internal APIs, and team workflows — across many repos and many machines without a hosted registry.

Skills live as plain files in your repo at .agents/skills/<name>/SKILL.md. quay synchronises them with a hub: any git repository you control (GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket). Push a skill to the hub; teammates quay add <name> it from a different project on a different machine. Mirror directories (.claude/skills/, .cursor/rules/, etc.) stay in sync automatically.

Why not a registry-as-a-service?

• No third-party server. Your hub is a git repo you already trust. No new accounts, no rate limits, no vendor lock-in.
• Audit-friendly. Every push is a commit. Every install reads a registry.json committed in plain text. git log is your history.
• Air-gap-friendly. Self-host the hub on Gitea, GitLab CE, or a Bitbucket server. quay does not phone home.
• Filesystem-first. Skills are files. Edit them with $EDITOR. git diff works. No special API.

Who this is for

• Engineers who run Claude Code, Cursor, or other agentic tools and want skill libraries that travel with the team — not the laptop.
• Teams running a mixed-provider stack (work GitHub + personal GitLab + customer Azure DevOps) who need profile-scoped configuration.
• Tooling authors building project bootstrapping flows (CI runners, devcontainers, ephemeral envs) that need declarative skill installs.

What's next

• Getting started — install, first profile, first push, first install. ~5 minutes.
• Concepts — the small vocabulary you need before reading the rest of the book.
• Tutorials — narrative walkthroughs.
• CLI reference and TUI reference — per-command, per-screen detail.