Exploring Joule Studio skills

• 05 October 2026
• joule-studio,
• skills,
• shell

Exploring the Joule Studio skills with a quick shell script.

The new Joule Studio CLI recently landed, in the form of jl. This is what we use on the command line to initialise a new Joule Studio project. What does that mean? Well, amongst other things, it means:

• you work on your project using a coding agent harness such as Claude Code or OpenCode
• such agent harnesses know about, and how to make use of skills
• for Joule Studio powered development, there is a curated set of skills specifically designed for building enterprise agents and more

Initialising a new project not only creates some harness-specific configuration¹ but also retrieves this set of skills.

Skills retrieved

Here's what that looks like:

# /tmp
; jl init opencode myproj && cd myproj

Fetching system skills...
  ✓ agent (+37 resources)
  ✓ agent-evaluation (+8 resources)
  ✓ agent-extension (+9 resources)
  ✓ data-product (+11 resources)
  ✓ deploy-solution
  ✓ intent-analysis
  ✓ joule-studio-cli
  ✓ mcp-mock-config (+4 resources)
  ✓ mcp-translation-file
  ✓ n8n-workflow (+21 resources)
  ✓ product-requirements-document (+1 resource)
  ✓ setup-solution (+2 resources)
  ✓ specification (+1 resource)
✓ 13 skills initialized in myproj/.agents/skills.

Creating configuration files:
  ✓ myproj/opencode.json — created

OpenCode MCP config initialized: /tmp/myproj
# /tmp/myproj
;

The specific skills retrieved here will depend on various circumstances, you may see a slightly different list.

Browsing the skill details

I wanted to explore these skills and get a better understanding of what they were. So I wrote a quick shell script (yes, I wrote it, not AI, to help maintain my cognitive fitness²), which allows me to browse them and get an overview, like this:

A brief look at the script

The shell script, sb, now forms part of my personal development environment (PDE and also uses other tools that I have in there. Here's the script in its entirety:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -eo pipefail
declare FILEBROWSER=lf

fm() {

  awk '/^---$/ { if (n++) exit; next } n'

}

pv() {

  local skillfile=$1
  local width=$2

  fm < "$skillfile" \
    | yq -r '"\(.name|ascii_upcase) (\(.metadata.version))\n\n\(.description)"' \
    | fmt -s -w "$width"

}

export -f pv fm

main() {

  local loc="${1:-.}"
  local descwidth=$((($(tput cols) / 2) - 5))
  local selection

  selection="$(
    while read -r skill; do
      echo "$skill" \
        | awk -F/ '{print $4, $0}'
    done <<< "$(find "$loc" -name "SKILL.md")" \
      | fzf \
        --with-nth=1 \
        --preview "pv {2} $descwidth" \
      | cut -d' ' -f 2
  )"

  "$FILEBROWSER" "$(dirname "$selection")"

}

main "$@"

The general idea is that SKILL.md files are found, passed to fzf for selection and preview³, and then a selected skill can be drilled into as well.

Here are some notes:

• The fm function extracts YAML frontmatter which is expected to be found between two --- lines.

• The pv function takes a skill file (fully qualified path and name) and also a width, uses fm to extract the frontmatter from it, and then uses yq to extract various values from the frontmatter, emitting them nicely, and line-wrapped to a certain width with the fmt command.

  Like this:

  SETUP-SOLUTION (1.0.0)
  
  Set up the solution structure with a
  solution.yaml and assets folder, each
  containing an asset with an asset.yaml
  file. Used to create a solution, to create
  an asset and to set up a multi-asset
  solution.

• These two script-local functions are exported to be available to any subprocesses, useful for when fzf spawns a shell to run the command specified in the --preview option.

• The main function will default to the current directory (.) if no location is specified to search for skills in.

  It then:

  • Calculates a width that is slightly less than half the current terminal width, to send to the fm function so that the skill info fits into fzf's default preview window shape.

  • Uses find to search for the full paths of any SKILL.md files, which look like this: ./.agents/skills/setup-solution/SKILL.md.

  • Processes these full paths with awk to emit the significant part (setup-solution in this example) to be used in fzf's selection list, and also the entire path, to be used for subsequent processing.

  • The resulting output is then passed to fzf to present a simple selection and preview UI, as shown in the video.

  • If a selection is made, cut is then used to select the second value that is emitted from fzf (the full path to the selected skill file) and then the configured file browser (I use lf here) is invoked on the directory that contains that skill file.

That's pretty much it. The script may change a little over time, but it works for me now, and removes the friction I had which was stopping me from exploring the detail of these important assets.

Footnotes

1. At the time of writing, this configuration consists of a section defining an MCP server and how to invoke it. More on that another time, perhaps.

2. Also, as shell scripts (particularly Bash shell scripts, my favourite) are what agents use to get their work done in many cases, it's always good to stay on top of things to really understand what they're doing.

3. I'm a big fan of fzf.

• ← Previous
  A community graph for people and things - onedevatlas