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Skills and telemetry

The skills catalog reads installed SKILL.md files from the local Claude skills directory and connects them to local event history.

Confirmed counts come from exact events:

  • direct skill events if Claude Code emits them in the hook payload,
  • Kanade-launched skills from the left-rail skill palette.
  • slash skills sent through Kanade’s chat input, when the slash name matches an installed skill.

When you click a skill in Kanade, the app injects /skill-name into the active lane and records a local SkillUseStart event with the skill id, account, and source. This is local-only telemetry in the same SQLite chronicle as hook events. The same local event is recorded when you type /skill-name into the chat box and send it through Kanade.

Claude Code does not currently expose direct skill-use events through every hook path, so Kanade can only count confirmed Kanade-launched skills or transcript-detected mentions. Prompt/text matches are labelled possible mentions and are never mixed into confirmed-launch counts.

Use Catalog to sort by confirmed launches and possible mentions. Use Optimize to find:

  • skills with no confirmed launches,
  • skills with possible mentions but no confirmed launch,
  • stale skills whose last confirmed launch is old,
  • high-use skills that may deserve cleanup or better docs.

Do not retire a skill solely because the confirmed count is zero. If you mostly invoke skills manually inside Claude Code, Kanade may only see the prompt text.

Optimize’s “smith’s appraisal” is Kanade’s narrated review of those signals. Each card is a suggestion, not an automatic verdict. The card explains the evidence, the proposed next action, and links to the skill detail page. Use hide for now to dismiss local noise while testing; it does not delete the skill or rewrite its SKILL.md.

Cards labelled no confirmed launch mean exactly that: Kanade did not record a local launch event. They may still show possible mentions if the skill name appeared in prompts or transcripts.