Chops Dev Environment Setup Skill
Lets an AI agent onboard a new developer onto the Chops macOS app — prerequisites, build, architecture, and common tasks.
The project's own dev-environment setup guide (macOS prerequisite checks, Xcode project generation), for new contributors to this project.
What does this skill do, and when should you use it?
This is the setup skill bundled with the Chops repository, a macOS app for organizing AI coding agent skills, located at .claude/skills/setup/. It guides an agent through a four-step flow: verifying prerequisites, generating the Xcode project with xcodegen, building and running the app, and walking a newcomer through the codebase architecture. It is essentially a structured onboarding document written for agents, best suited to developers who want to contribute to Chops itself. Note it is not a general-purpose setup skill — every prerequisite and build command is tied to macOS 15+ and the Xcode toolchain.
The skill instructs an agent to: 1) verify prerequisites one by one (via sw_vers, xcode-select -p, which brew, which xcodegen), telling the user what to install and stopping if anything is missing; 2) run xcodegen generate to produce Chops.xcodeproj from project.yml, stressing that the .xcodeproj must never be edited directly; 3) build with xcodebuild -scheme Chops -configuration Debug build, or open in Xcode and press Cmd+R; 4) deliver an architecture orientation covering the ChopsApp.swift entry point, AppState state management, SwiftData models (Skill, Collection, ToolSource), services (SkillScanner, FileWatcher, SkillParser, SearchService), the three-column NavigationSplitView layout, and the scanned paths for five tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Codex, Amp).
- A developer contributing to Chops needs to set up a local build environment after first cloning the repo
- An engineer using Claude Code or a similar agent wants the agent to automatically detect and fix missing prerequisites (e.g., xcodegen not installed)
- An engineer taking over Chops maintenance needs to quickly understand the SwiftData models, service layer, and views before changing code
- A developer adding support for a new coding tool in Chops (a new ToolSource enum case) needs to know the extension points
- A new team member onboards with an agent walking them from clone to running app step by step
What are this skill's strengths and limitations?
- Complete, executable onboarding steps — exact commands given for prerequisite checks, project generation, and building
- File-level architecture orientation lets the agent locate code precisely (models, services, and views all have explicit paths)
- Key design constraints are spelled out (project.yml as single source of truth, no sandbox, no test suite), preventing agent mistakes
- Includes common-task guidance (adding a tool, modifying parsing, changing UI), lowering contribution friction
- Applies only to the Chops project and hard-requires macOS 15+ and the Xcode toolchain; unusable elsewhere
- The project has no automated test suite, so all changes must be validated manually
- The agent stops outright if a prerequisite check fails, requiring the user to install dependencies manually
- The repo's license is tagged NOASSERTion in metadata while the README states FSL-1.1-MIT — verify license terms before adopting
How do you install this skill?
The skill ships with the Chops repository. After cloning, it lives at .claude/skills/setup/SKILL.md and is picked up automatically by Claude Code. Other Agent Skills-compatible tools can copy the setup folder manually into their respective skill directories (e.g., ~/.claude/skills/ or the Codex equivalent). Clone with: git clone https://github.com/Shpigford/chops.git. The repository is licensed FSL-1.1-MIT.
How do you use this skill?
Inside a cloned Chops repository, ask Claude Code (or another supported agent) something like "set up this project's development environment". The agent follows the skill's steps: first checking macOS 15+, Xcode CLI tools, Homebrew, and xcodegen (halting with install instructions if anything is missing), then running xcodegen generate, then building and running. Re-run xcodegen generate whenever project.yml changes. Note there is no automated testing — the repo explicitly states there is no test suite, so changes must be validated by building and running manually.