homecrew
Share agent skills across your team and keep them in sync
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What is homecrew?
Homecrew is an open-source package manager for agent skills that helps teams share and manage AI agent skills across multiple coding agents. It treats agent skills like packages, allowing users to install a skill once and have it automatically copied into every supported coding agent on their machine including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, and Goose.
Key features include multi-agent installation (one install command covers all detected agents), team taps (private git repos become registries for shared skills), dependency resolution (skills can depend on other skills with transitive installation), automatic background updates via autoupdate, local-edit protection (refuses to overwrite customizations), and a git-native workflow where SKILL.md serves as the manifest. The CLI supports commands like crew install, crew update, crew search, crew tap add, crew list, and crew autoupdate enable.
Homecrew is designed for engineering teams who want to share agent playbooks, prompts, and skills across multiple developers and laptops. It's particularly useful for onboarding new hires with a team-baseline meta-skill, maintaining consistent agent configurations across a team, and keeping skills current through version-controlled git repos. Individual developers also benefit from installing skills once across all their agents and recreating their setup on new machines.
homecrew pricing
Pricing model: Freemium
Free and open-source. Homecrew is an open-source project by Logic, Inc. There is no paid tier, no per-seat pricing, and no hosted service fees. The tool is a single binary that users install locally, skills are stored in ~/.crew/ and agents' skills directories, and taps are git repos that teams host themselves (e.g., on GitHub).
homecrew pros
- Open-source package manager for agent skills
- One install command covers all detected coding agents
- Supports 15+ agents including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, Goose
- Team taps let private git repos become skill registries
- Skill dependencies with transitive resolution
- Background autoupdate every 4 hours via launchd agent
- Local-edit protection prevents overwriting customizations
- No telemetry - never phones home
- Git-native workflow with version control
- SKILL.md as simple manifest (no proprietary format)
- Meta-skills enable one-command team onboarding
- Search across all configured taps with crew search
- Pinned skills skip updates unless forced
- Atomic upgrades with file copies (no symlinks)
- crew doctor verifies integrity and can repair drift
- Single binary installer with signed checksum verification
- Namespace support for organizing related skills
homecrew cons
- macOS 13+ only (no Linux or Windows support yet)
- Uses launchd for autoupdate (macOS-specific)
- File copies instead of symlinks use more disk space
- Requires git credentials for private taps
- Only supports agents that read the agent skills spec
- Background autoupdate checks every 4 hours (not real-time)
- No hosted registry (must self-host taps)
- Tile-based UI requires terminal knowledge
- New adapter for each new agent must be written manually
- Recursive tap discovery is opt-in for non-standard layouts
Frequently asked questions about homecrew
How is Homecrew different from skills.sh or gh skill?
Homecrew leans hard into team workflows with features particular to it: taps (point at a git repo once and every skill is searchable/installable), skill dependencies (Homecrew walks the graph and installs everything needed), background autoupdate via launchd agent, local-edit protection (refuses to clobber your edits on re-install), and private-first design (clones taps with your existing git credentials, no hosted middleman).
Is Homecrew useful if I don't have a team?
Yes. Homecrew is still a package manager for your own skills. Install a skill once and it lands in every detected agent. Add your personal skills repo as a tap and your library becomes searchable. Use a baseline skill to recreate your setup on a new Mac. The team features are the same primitives scaled up: git sources, taps, dependency resolution, source tracking, autoupdate, and local-edit protection.
How does Homecrew work with a private team skills repo?
Same as any private git repo you clone. Add it as a tap with 'crew tap add [email protected]:acme/skills.git'. Homecrew uses whatever credentials your git already has—SSH keys, personal access tokens, GitHub Enterprise hosts. Nothing gets uploaded anywhere; there's no intermediary registry. Every main-merge automatically becomes installable team-wide, and with 'crew autoupdate enable' every Mac pulls approved skill updates on the next interval.
Can skills depend on other skills?
Yes. A SKILL.md's frontmatter can list metadata.crew.dependencies—an array of skill references in any form the CLI accepts. Homecrew walks the graph transitively and installs every dependency before the parent. The most useful pattern is a 'meta-skill'—a single skill whose body describes a team's conventions and whose dependencies list pulls in the real working skills. Onboarding a new engineer becomes one command.
Does one install really cover every coding agent?
Yes. 'crew install founding-engineer' copies the skill into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, Goose, and every other supported agent detected on the machine. Agents that share a convention get one physical copy, and the install summary reports each adapter by name. Don't have one of them? It's skipped silently. Add the agent later, run 'crew update', and it catches up.
Why does Homecrew use copies instead of symlinks?
Symlinks break the moment two agents resolve a skill differently, or a user pins one agent to an older ref. Copies are dumb, predictable, and safe: each agent's directory is self-sufficient. The marginal disk cost is negligible—skills are markdown.
What happens if I edit an installed skill?
Homecrew records a content hash in the .crew.json marker at install time. On the next 'crew install' or 'crew update', it recomputes the hash. If it differs, Homecrew refuses to overwrite your changes and reports 'customized'. You pass '--force' to override, or copy your edits into a new skill and install that instead.
Is there a hosted registry?
No. The default tap 'core' is a plain git repo. Anyone can host a tap—your team, your company, yourself. Homecrew never phones home or uploads your skills.
Who builds Homecrew?
Homecrew is an open-source project by Logic, Inc. Logic is a platform for building and operating fleets of production agents reliably at scale.
What about Linux and Windows support?
Future work. The v1 spec is macOS-only because launchd is the autoupdate mechanism and each agent adapter encodes platform-specific paths. Nothing in the core design is Mac-specific; it's a scope decision, not a technical one.