boost-skills

Sander Muller's personal Composer-distributed catalog of AI agent skills for PHP projects and Composer packages. Adopt it if your preferences align with Sander's, or use it as a template for your own.

sandermuller/boost-skills is one example of a Composer-distributed AI-skill catalog. It ships a curated mix of generic workflow skills (code review, bug fixing, spec-driven implementation, release checklists, Jira workflows, deployment, and more), tag-gated framework-specific extras, and always-on guidelines — see the full Skills and Guidelines inventories below.

The package carries no runtime code; it's pure Markdown. A sync engine (sandermuller/boost-core or laravel/boost) reads these skills and writes them into each AI agent directory you've configured (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Codex, Gemini, and the rest).

Documentation: https://sandermuller.github.io/boost-core/packages/boost-skills/

Install

Install the catalog next to the family package for your role:

composer require --dev sandermuller/boost-skills sandermuller/package-boost-php

Swap package-boost-php for the member that matches your project — the picker decides it in two questions. Then allowlist this vendor, because a catalog ships nothing until you name it:

return BoostConfig::configure()
    ->withAgents([Agent::CLAUDE_CODE, Agent::COPILOT, Agent::CODEX])
    ->withAllowedVendors([
        'sandermuller/boost-skills',
        'sandermuller/package-boost-php',
    ])
    ->withTags(['php', 'github']);

vendor/bin/boost install   # the picker offers this vendor; select it
vendor/bin/boost sync

vendor/bin/boost tags shows which tagged content is filtered out, so you can see what declaring one more tag would unlock.

Under laravel/boost instead of the family engine, follow its own setup and make sure this package is among the ones it syncs. Tag filtering and Project Conventions slots go inert there; the skills carry visible defaults, so a slot still reads as sensible wording.

Documentation

The rest of this README is the inventory: what this catalog ships, under which tags.

Skills

Tags

Most skills and guidelines are universal — they sync to every project. Some carry capability tags naming what the project needs (or has opted in to) for the content to be useful. A project declares its capabilities in boost.php via ->withTags(...), and only matching content syncs.

The tag mechanism (subset-AND match, withTags() declaration in boost.php, metadata.boost-tags in skill frontmatter, the .boost-tags.yaml sidecar manifest for guidelines) is family-canonical — defined by boost-core and applies to any Composer-distributed catalog. The tag vocabulary below is one catalog's choice — Sander's mix of capabilities surfaced by skills and guidelines boost-skills ships. Other catalogs may organize differently. Owner names which boost-family package ships the content using each tag.

boost-core ships a broader Tag enum (SanderMuller\BoostCore\Enums\Tag) with cases not bound to any skill in this catalog — Tag::Filament, Tag::Livewire, Tag::Volt, Tag::Inertia, Tag::Flux, Tag::Pest, Tag::Tailwind, and others. These are forward-compatible slots in the family vocabulary. Declaring them in your withTags(...) is harmless today (no shipped skill targets them yet) and survives boost install picker re-runs per boost-core's declared-but-undiscovered preservation rule. The table below covers only the tags boost-skills itself currently ships content under; see Tag::* in boost-core for the full enum vocabulary.

github and github-issues are independent. github covers any GitHub-hosted repo (used by PR and release skills); github-issues is the narrower tag for projects that track issues in GitHub Issues specifically. A repo hosted on GitHub but tracking issues in Jira declares github but not github-issues. Both are independently declarable in ->withTags(...).

A skill or guideline can carry more than one tag, and then applies only where the project declares all of them — jira-rework is jira + github. Skill tags live inline in the skill's SKILL.md frontmatter (metadata.boost-tags); guideline tags live in a sidecar .boost-tags.yaml manifest (guidelines stay frontmatter-free for laravel/boost compatibility). Filtering needs boost-core 0.5+ for skills and 0.6+ for the guideline manifest; on older versions or under laravel/boost, the tags are inert and everything in this package syncs.

Guidelines

Alongside skills, the package ships guidelines under resources/boost/guidelines/ — short Markdown files of project-wide conventions that the sync engine folds into CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md. Unlike skills, guidelines are always active — no on-demand activation.

Guidelines can be tagged, like skills, so one ships only to projects with the matching capability. But a guideline file stays frontmatter-free (for laravel/boost compatibility — it has no guideline frontmatter parser), so the tags live in a sidecar resources/boost/guidelines/.boost-tags.yaml manifest instead. boost-core 0.6.0+ reads it; on older boost-core and under laravel/boost the manifest is inert and every guideline ships.

Editing skills and guidelines

Each skill is a Markdown file at resources/boost/skills/<name>/SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter — name and description, plus optional metadata (a skill's boost-tags live here) and argument-hint. Guidelines are plain Markdown at resources/boost/guidelines/<name>.md with no frontmatter — they must start directly at a heading, so they render correctly under both boost-core and laravel/boost. Edit both here in this repository, not in a consuming project's synced copy, which boost-core overwrites on the next sync. The ai-guidelines skill documents the frontmatter contract and authoring conventions.

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md for release history.

Security

Found a vulnerability? Email [email protected] rather than opening a public issue. See SECURITY.md for the disclosure policy.

Credits

• Sander Muller

License

MIT. See LICENSE.