AI assistants

Open-lmake has a skill that teaches AI coding assistants how to write good Lmakefiles: the skills/lmakefile directory of the repository.

A skill is a directory of plain markdown files following the Agent Skills format: an entry point SKILL.md (small, ~2k tokens) that the agent loads whenever the task involves an Lmakefile, plus reference files under references/ that it loads on demand. It covers the open-lmake paradigm, rule authoring, the classic pitfalls LLMs fall into, integrating stateful tools (conan, pip, cargo, ...) and how to verify a flow with lmake/lshow.

The skill is written for humans as much as for agents.

Claude Code

The open-lmake repository is also a Claude Code plugin marketplace, so installation is 2 commands:

/plugin marketplace add cesar-douady/open-lmake
/plugin install lmakefile@open-lmake

Alternatively, skip the plugin system and copy (or symlink) the skill directory:

cp -r skills/lmakefile ~/.claude/skills/           # available in all your projects
cp -r skills/lmakefile <project>/.claude/skills/   # available in one project (and to your co-workers if committed)

Either way there is nothing to activate : Claude loads the skill by itself when the task touches an Lmakefile.

claude.ai and the Claude API

On claude.ai, custom skills are uploaded as a zip file in the settings (capabilities section):

cd skills ; zip -r lmakefile.zip lmakefile

With the Claude API, upload the same zip through the Skills API and attach it to your requests.

Other agents (Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, ...)

Nothing in the skill is Claude-specific : it is plain markdown plus a YAML header. A growing number of tools understand the Agent Skills format natively; for those, copy skills/lmakefile into the tool's skill directory (check its documentation for the location) and you are done.

For any other tool, reproduce manually what skill-aware tools do (a small entry in the permanent context, details on demand):

  1. Copy skills/lmakefile/ into your project (or anywhere the agent can read).
  2. Add to the instructions file your tool always reads (AGENTS.md, GEMINI.md, .cursor/rules, a system prompt, ...):

When writing, reviewing or debugging an Lmakefile, first read skills/lmakefile/SKILL.md and follow it. Load the files under skills/lmakefile/references/ on demand, as SKILL.md directs.

Only the entry point is paid for up front; the references are read when needed.