Stop Your AI Agent From Building Code on Abandoned 2022 Libraries (Open-Source MCP Server)

Intelligent technology stack and open-source curator for AI coding agents.

Never let your AI agent build production code on abandoned 2022 libraries.

When you ask Cursor, Claude Code, Antigravity, or Copilot:

"Build an AI meeting assistant that records audio, separates speakers, and generates summaries"

The model immediately starts writing code using libraries from its static pre-training data. Meanwhile:

GPL-3.0 or CC-BY-NC-4.0 libraries can create major intellectual property and commercial liabilities. skills-but-for-dev fixes this. It acts as an autonomous pre-flight curator for your agent, querying live GitHub velocity, PyPI monthly adoption, and Hugging Face VRAM requirements before writing code.

stars:>500) alongside fast-rising breakout repositories ( stars:75..3500, pushed $< 30$ days) without cannibalization. pypistats.org to protect against star-inflation and GitHub bots..safetensors, sharded model weights, Diffusers pipelines, and distinct GGUF quantization levels (Q4_K_M, Q8_0). gh auth token) or falls back to an adaptive, quota-conserving unauthenticated mode.

flowchart TD
    User["Developer Prompt\n'Build a RAG system for PDF invoices'"] --> Agent["AI Coding Agent\n(Cursor / Antigravity / Claude Code)"]
    Skill["SKILL.md"] -.->|"Decomposition Instructions"| Agent
    Agent -->|"1. search_github_repos('pdf parser')\n2. search_hf_models('embeddings')"| Server["skills-but-for-dev MCP Server"]

    subgraph Server_Internals["skills-but-for-dev Engine"]
        Server --> Norm["Query Normalizer\n(Noise stripping & Language filter)"]
        Norm --> GH["GitHub REST Client\n(Dual-Bucket search + Star Velocity)"]
        Norm --> HF["Hugging Face Client\n(VRAM & Pipeline Estimator)"]
        Norm --> PyPI["PyPI Stats Client\n(30-Day Download Verification)"]
        GH --> Scoring["Conservative Scoring Engine\n(80% Base + 10% Health + 10% PyPI)"]
        HF --> Scoring
        PyPI --> Scoring
        Scoring --> Cache[("SQLite Cache (WAL Mode)\n~4.7ms warm latency")]
    end

    Server -->|"Curated Architecture Recipe"| Agent
    Agent -->|"Step-by-step Tech Stack with Verified Licences"| User

uvx (Zero Installation) No cloning or virtual environment setup required. Works with any MCP-compatible client:

uvx skills-but-for-dev ping

.cursor/mcp.json)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "skills-but-for-dev": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["skills-but-for-dev"],
      "env": {
        "GITHUB_TOKEN": "optional_your_pat_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

mcp_config.json)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "skills-but-for-dev": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["skills-but-for-dev"]
    }
  }
}

claude_desktop_config.json)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "skills-but-for-dev": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["skills-but-for-dev"]
    }
  }
}

Tip: If you already use the GitHub CLI (gh), skills-but-for-dev automatically detects your authentication token via gh auth token. You don't even need to configure GITHUB_TOKEN manually!

When your agent uses skills-but-for-dev, it generates structured architecture recipes before writing code:

Benchmarked across realistic multi-layer agent scenarios using strict Ground Truth matching:

You can run the evaluation suite locally at any time:

python evals/run_evals.py

Inspect active tokens, cache paths, and server health directly from your terminal:

skills-but-for-dev --version

skills-but-for-dev ping

For mathematical formulas (star velocity moving averages, exponential recency decay, dormant spike detection ratios), see ARCHITECTURE.md.

Distributed under the Apache License 2.0.