---
phase: requirements
title: Requirements & Problem Understanding
description: Clarify the problem space, gather requirements, and define success criteria
---

# Requirements & Problem Understanding

## Problem Statement
**What problem are we solving?**

- Users cannot quickly discover available skills across registries by keyword.
- Skill registries are distributed across multiple repos, each with a `skills/` folder.
- Current search requires cloning or scanning full registries, which is slow and wasteful.

## Goals & Objectives
**What do we want to achieve?**

- Provide `npx ai-devkit@latest skill find <keyword>` to list matching skills.
- Make search fast without cloning full registries.
- Keep results reasonably fresh via a lightweight index update trigger.
- Keep output useful for install (skill name + description).
- Non-goals: downloading or installing skills in this feature; ranking by popularity.

## User Stories & Use Cases
**How will users interact with the solution?**

- As a user, I want to search by keyword so that I can find relevant skills to install.
- As a user, I want results to include the skill name and description for quick evaluation.
- As a user, I want search to be fast even with many registries.
- As a maintainer, I want indexing to avoid full repo clones.
- Edge cases: no matches, multiple registries with same skill name, offline mode.

## Success Criteria
**How will we know when we're done?**

- `npx ai-devkit@latest skill find typescript` returns matching skills within 500ms with warm cache.
- Index update does not clone full registries for typical usage.
- Search works across all registries in `skills/registry.json`.
- Clear output format and exit codes for no matches or errors.

## Constraints & Assumptions
**What limitations do we need to work within?**

- Registries are Git repos with a `skills/` directory containing skill folders.
- Users may have limited bandwidth; avoid large downloads.
- Assume Git is available or use HTTP fetch if possible.
- Assume registries can be accessed without authentication (or handle auth errors).
- Unauthenticated GitHub API calls are rate-limited; refresh frequency must respect this.

## Questions & Open Items
**What do we still need to clarify?**

- No open items at this time.

