IpMan - Intelligence Package Manager

I can take on ten.

The skills housekeeper for AI agents. Discover, organize, absorb, dedup and clean the skills already on your machine — like a disk-cleanup utility, but for agent skills. It never installs and never destroys.

Documentation | 中文文档 | 中文 README

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What it is (and is not)

Skills pile up: copied folders, half-remembered clones, duplicates across projects, broken leftovers. Your agent's own tooling installs skills — but nothing tidies them.

IpMan is that missing housekeeper. It does not install or uninstall skills — your agent's native mechanisms keep doing that. IpMan handles what they don't:

Verb	What it does
scan / status	See every skills directory (user-global and per-project) and the true state of each skill: real dir, symlink, broken, duplicate, suite-managed
absorb	Take loose skill folders into one central store (a fresh git repo each — changes tracked from then on) and leave a symlink in place. Your agent notices nothing
dedup	Find byte-identical copies across projects and merge them onto one stored original
clean	Broken links, orphaned store entries, empty shells — quarantined to ~/.ipman/trash, never deleted
enable / disable	Switch a skill off without losing it (the link goes, the original stays), switch it back on anytime
pack	Name a set of skills and enable/disable them as one unit, in any scope
takeover / release	Optionally put a whole skills directory in IpMan's custody: survives accidental rm -rf, restorable with one sync

Everything destructive is dry-run first and quarantined — recoverable, always.

Quick start

pipx install ipman-cli        # or: pip install ipman-cli / uv tool install ipman-cli

ipman                         # in a terminal: the interactive TUI
ipman status                  # or the same, as plain text
ipman scan                    # deep scan: wild skills, duplicates, cleanables

Typical first session:

ipman absorb --user           # inventory of ~/.claude/skills: what's absorbable
ipman absorb --user my-notes  # take one over (moved to store, symlinked back)
ipman dedup                   # duplicate report (dry-run)
ipman clean                   # cleanables report (dry-run)

Toolkits are recognized, not mangled

Toolkits like gstack are git clones that dozens of your other skills symlink into. IpMan identifies them — scan reports Suites detected: gstack: 55 skills, and each wrapper shows suite:gstack rather than a generic suite. Trying to absorb such a root is refused (it would break every dependent); the right move is directory custody (takeover), which protects the whole directory while leaving the toolkit's own updater untouched. Marketplace plugins and independent clones are never touched either.

Use it from inside your agent

Install the companion skills (explicitly — IpMan never auto-installs anything, not even itself):

ipman skill-sync --scope claude-code-user   # installs 'ipman' + 'ipman-update'

Then tell your agent "clean up my skills" / "整理一下我的技能" — it drives the same engine through --json commands, confirming before every write. The skills stay version-locked to the CLI (ipman skill-sync --check).

Updating is a skill too: /ipman-update detects how you installed (pipx / uv / pip), upgrades the CLI from PyPI on your OK, then regenerates the skills so they never drift from the tool.

Status bar: ipman statusline prints one line for your agent's status bar:

ipman statusline    # -> 📦 user⚑12 | myproj✓3 | !1断链   (⚑ custody, ✓ native)

Wire it into Claude Code's statusLine command in settings.json.

Speaks your language

The whole interface — status values (real/link/broken), error messages, the TUI and CLI output — auto-switches between English and Chinese based on your locale (LANG / LC_ALL). zh* gives you 真目录/软链接/断链; anything else stays English. Nothing to configure.

Safety model

• Never installs, never uninstalls — organization only
• Dry-run first: dedup/clean report before --apply
• Quarantine, not deletion: clean --apply moves to ~/.ipman/trash; --empty-trash is a separate, explicit step
• Pinned read-only originals: absorbed skills link to read-only snapshots — even a trailing-slash rm -rf can't gut the store
• Toolkits, clones and marketplace plugins are left alone: anything with its own manager or upstream is reported, never touched

Status

v3 (0.4.x): the housekeeper surface is new; verified on macOS with Claude Code. Windows: per-skill operations expected to work (junction fallback, CI-tested), directory takeover pending a Windows verification pass. Feedback and issues welcome.

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE for details.