Choosing a pouch and assistants

A pouch is one encrypted set of instructions, skills, agents, commands, MCP servers, hooks and plugins. You can have several (for example work and personal), and each computer syncs one pouch at a time. Switch later on the dashboard’s Pouches tab.

The first sync

After you pick a pouch, the dashboard asks how to start.

An empty pouch starts from one assistant’s setup, or from nothing:

• Start from an assistant: its setup is copied into the pouch. The assistant keeps working as before.
• Nothing from this computer: the pouch starts empty. Add skills, agents and MCP servers in the web app.

A pouch that already has items offers three choices:

Choice	What happens
Use the pouch	This computer gets the pouch’s items. Its own copies are backed up, then replaced.
Merge both	The pouch keeps its items and gets this computer’s too. Same name, different content: both are kept.
Use this computer	The pouch is replaced with what’s on this computer, for every computer that syncs it.

Nothing is deleted without a backup: files that get replaced are copied to ~/.skillpouch/backups/ first.

What syncs on this computer

Next, choose the assistants and kinds this computer syncs. Everything is on unless you turn it off. The kinds are:

• Instructions
• Skills
• Agents
• Commands
• MCP servers
• Hooks
• Plugins

The choice belongs to this computer only; other computers choose for themselves. Change it later on the dashboard’s Sync tab or with skillpouch select:

skillpouch select                 # list what's on and off
skillpouch select --off hooks     # stop putting hooks into assistants here
skillpouch select --on codex      # sync Codex again

Turning an assistant or a kind off hands its items back right away: SkillPouch’s links become ordinary files, so nothing stops working.

How items reach your assistants

The pouch is kept as ordinary files under ~/.skillpouch/. SkillPouch links each assistant’s folders to those files, so editing a skill in any assistant edits the pouch. Where a link can’t work, the assistant gets a copy instead (commands in Gemini’s TOML format, and files on Windows without Developer Mode); edits to a copy are brought back before each sync. MCP servers, hooks and plugins are written into the assistants’ config files, changing only the entries SkillPouch added.

Agents and commands are translated into each assistant’s own format: its front matter, tool names and argument placeholder. What goes where is listed per assistant.