task-observer - One Skill to Rule Them All

The meta-skill that builds and improves all your skills, including itself.

Why "One Skill to Rule Them All"? The slogan doesn't claim this is the best skill. It couldn't be: a meta-skill is useless without the skills it watches over. It describes what Task Observer does: keep an eye on how all your other skills are working and suggest improvements. You decide which changes are installed.

This meta-skill has logged over 1,800 observations across my 81 skills, most of which were turned into skill improvements. The majority of my 81 skills were themselves created based on observations by the meta-skill.

The current version of task-observer also includes improvements from over 80 contributors, each credited as an author or co-author in the commit history, and over 200 issues and pull requests have been closed. Without these contributions, the project wouldn't be half as good as it is today.

This meta-skill is a practical application of the Augmented Expertise methodology, an AI framework for knowledge workers. However, users have reported successful integrations into their Hermes and Openclaw setups, so it works equally well with autonomous agents.

Quick install

1. Install it, by either route:
   • From a terminal (Vercel's skills CLI, needs Node.js): npx skills add rebelytics/one-skill-to-rule-them-all --skill task-observer — add -g to install it for all your projects. This is the most-used route: the skills.sh listing reports over 10,000 installs, a lower bound because the CLI's install telemetry is opt-out.
   • In the Claude apps (web, desktop, mobile, Cowork): upload the .skill bundle from the latest release via Settings → Customize.
2. Activate it, whichever route you used: add the activation instruction from references/environments.md to your CLAUDE.md (or your platform's equivalent), then check that it runs (see "Check that it actually runs" below). Installing alone is not enough, because description matching under-triggers.

Why you should use task-observer

Creating skills is powerful but time-consuming. The skills that do get built stay frozen: they never learn from how you actually use them.

Task Observer fixes those problems. It's a meta-skill that runs alongside your work, watches what you do, and does two things:

1. Identifies new skills for you — it spots repeating patterns in your work and flags them as skill candidates, then helps you build them, so you get skills without staring at a blank page.
2. Improves your existing skills — it notices corrections you make, preferences you express, and gaps in your current skills, then suggests specific updates.

You work normally. It watches. Your skill library grows and gets better over time.

The self-improving part

This is the detail that makes Task Observer truly beautiful in my opinion. Because it runs during every session and observes all active skills — including itself — it captures improvements to its own methodology over time.

If it misses something, or if its observation format could be clearer, or if it's triggering in contexts where it shouldn't — it notices, and it logs that too. The skill that improves all your skills also improves itself.

What it does

Task Observer monitors your work sessions and looks for three things: