Skillsaw: Lints the files that steer your AI coding agents
Skillsaw is a new linting tool designed for AI coding agents. It checks configuration files like rules, custom instructions, and agent specs for errors such as misspellings, truncation warnings, and dead references, helping developers avoid subtle misconfigurations that can cause unexpected agent behavior.
Background
- Skillsaw is a new open-source linting tool designed specifically for AI coding agent configuration files (e.g., Cursor rules, Copilot instructions, custom agent prompts). "Linting" means automatically checking files for errors, inconsistencies, or violations of best practices — like a spellchecker for code style.
- AI coding agents are tools (Cursor, GitHub Copilot, etc.) that can generate or edit code based on natural-language instructions. These agents rely on plain-text configuration/rules files (often Markdown) that tell them how to behave, which libraries to use, what coding style to follow, etc.
- The problem Skillsaw addresses: these configuration files have no standard syntax checker. Mistakes in them (typos, contradictory rules, broken references) silently cause AI agents to produce worse code, but there was no easy way to catch such errors before running the agent.
- Skillsaw fills the same role for AI agent configs that tools like ESLint (for JavaScript) or Ruff (for Python) fill for source code: catch problems early, enforce consistency, and save debugging time.