You are not logged in.
Hi everyone!
Over the last year or so, I have been contributing packages to the AUR and have found it difficult to follow every single recommendation that is stated in the extensive Wikis perfectly as a beginner. I have therefore attempted to rely on external utilities such as NotebookLM to help me gain a better understanding of the requirements, and verify my packages against them with more certainty. And although they have served me well as "linters", I would prefer not having to copy and paste my files into a chat interface on every change, and I also want to be able to share these helpers with the rest of the community, in the hopes that they may make other beginners' lives easier and improve package quality for us all.
So, recently, I have been playing with local AI agents through the use of tools like OpenCode, and have noticed that when integrated with MCP servers and Skills, they become quite powerful, and are able to follow strict requirements quite well. It was then that I thought of mocking up Skills specifically designed to aid with the creation of AUR packages, and have carefully crafted them, feeding them all the necessary documentation and verifying that everything that is stated the SKILL.md files follows the guidelines to a tee.
I am therefore looking for feedback from the community, to see what you think about this idea, and whether you believe it's something that could truly come in handy for the creation and betterment of AUR packages all around, or whether it's something that is likely to do more harm than good. Here is a link to the GitHub repository with these skills. You can find the installation and usage instructions there.
Additionally, I would like to preemptively address concerns which I can envision being brought up:
1. This will result in more AI slop:
The main purpose of these skills is to reduce exactly that. New users are very likely to rely on AIs for the verification of their PKGBUILDs, which are notoriously innacurate, even if you try feeding them the right info. We cannot prevent this, but with these skills, they can give their AI agents a higher chance at following the guidelines correctly, and hallucinating less. And although it may result in more users actually attempting to push packages to the AUR, those that are well-versed enough in technology to run an AI agent with these skills are likely to take it more seriously and therefore not be as problematic.
2. It will make it easier to mask malware:
Yes. It will be easier to create PKGBUILDs with malware that look innocent on the surface, and follow the guidelines perfectly. But, this is textbook "appeal to consequences", and has been said for basically every technological advancement known to man.
3. What if the guidelines change?:
Since the repository is public, I encourage pull requests that modify existing skills with any changes people may see fit. Paradoxically, this would likely result in more people actually following the most recent changes to the guidelines, as instead of having to re-read all the wiki pages, they will simply have to update the skills, and their AI agents will do the reading for them.
4. This will result in fewer people reading the actual Wiki pages:
People who don't read the guidelines manually and just use the skills directly probably wouldn't have paid much attention to the guidelines anyways, or at least not enough to keep more of them in mind when working on their package than an AI agent would. So, hopefully this results in higher quality packages being pushed to the AUR overall.
I appreciate both positive and negative feedback on this matter, and hope that it will be an interesting discussion for all. Thank you for reading.
Offline