boost-skills

sandermuller/boost-skills is a catalog package: Sander Muller's personal mix of AI agent skills for PHP projects and Composer packages. Adopt it if your preferences align with his, or read it as a template for your own catalog.

Where this package lives

GitHub · Packagist · Releases · Changelog

Each family package has its own repository and its own release cadence. This site is built from the boost-core repository, so a documentation fix goes there, and a code issue goes to the repository above.

It is not a dependency of the family wrappers. You require it and allowlist its vendor, and then its skills ship alongside whatever else you already receive.

The package carries no runtime code. It is pure Markdown. A sync engine, either this family's engine or laravel/boost, reads the skills and writes them into each agent directory you configured.

Install

Install it 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. Then allowlist the 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 the vendor; select it
vendor/bin/boost sync

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

Declare your tags

Most skills in the catalog are universal and ship everywhere. Some carry capability tags naming what the project needs for the content to be useful. 'php' and 'github' are the common starters. The full vocabulary is in the catalog.

The tag mechanism is family-canonical and defined by the engine. The tag vocabulary is this catalog's own choice. Another catalog may organise differently. See Tags and dependencies.

Under laravel/boost instead

laravel/boost reads any Composer-distributed catalog, including this one, so you can use it standalone and follow its own setup. Two family features go inert there: tag filtering, and the Project Conventions slots. The skills carry visible defaults, so a slot still reads as sensible wording even when nothing resolves it.

Editing a skill or a guideline

Edit the source in the catalog repository, never the synced copy in a consuming project. The next sync overwrites that copy.

A skill is a Markdown file at resources/boost/skills/<name>/SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter: name and description, plus optional metadata (where boost-tags and boost-requires live) and argument-hint.

A guideline is plain Markdown at resources/boost/guidelines/<name>.md with no frontmatter. It must open directly on a heading, so it renders under both this family's engine and laravel/boost. Its tags live in the sidecar .boost-tags.yaml instead.

The catalog's own ai-guidelines skill documents the frontmatter contract and the authoring conventions in full.