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

A developer released skills-but-for-dev, an open-source MCP server that acts as a pre-flight curator for AI coding agents such as Cursor, Claude Code and Copilot, checking live GitHub activity, PyPI download counts and Hugging Face VRAM requirements before the agent commits to a library. The server scores candidates with an 80% base, 10% health and 10% PyPI weighting, filters out GPL and non-commercial licenses, and caches results in SQLite for roughly 4.7ms warm latency. It runs via uvx with no installation and auto-detects GitHub credentials through gh auth token.

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. | Task: "Build a local meeting notes agent" | ❌ Vanilla AI Agent Without skills-but-for-dev | ✅ AI Agent + skills-but-for-dev | |---|---|---| | Transcription ASR | Suggests SpeechRecognition deprecated Python 2 era wrapper | Systran/faster-whisper 9.6M/mo PyPI downloads, 4x faster CTranslate2 | | Speaker Diarization | Tries to hand-code clustering or hallucinates non-existent APIs | modelscope/FunASR / pyannote.audio Verified active acceleration: $v 4 / v {12} = 1.2$ | | Licensing | Generates code importing GPL / non-commercial packages | 100% Permissive Verification Flags MIT / Apache-2.0, filters restrictive licenses | | Local Hardware Check | Recommends large Whisper model, crashing local GPU | Automatic VRAM Baseline Estimates 0.54 GB FP16 ceiling for faster-whisper-small | 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: Verify it runs and check diagnostics 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: | Layer | Recommended Component | Star Velocity | Real-World PyPI Adoption | License | Hardware / Memory | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | ASR Speech-to-Text | SYSTRAN/faster-whisper https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper | $v 4 = 18.2$/day accel: 1.15 | 9,614,222 downloads/mo | MIT | ~0.54 GB VRAM small FP16 | | Speaker Diarization | modelscope/FunASR https://github.com/modelscope/FunASR | $v 4 = 8.4$/day accel: 1.20 | 272,534 downloads/mo | MIT | ~1.2 GB VRAM | | Embeddings | sentence-transformers https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers | $v 4 = 14.1$/day accel: 1.05 | 22,332,616 downloads/mo | Apache-2.0 | ~0.62 GB VRAM | Benchmarked across realistic multi-layer agent scenarios using strict Ground Truth matching: | Metric | Result | Benchmark Details | |---|---|---| | Warm Cache Latency | 4.73 ms | Sub-5 millisecond response time via SQLite WAL mode | | Cold API Latency | 1,728 ms | Optimized single-flight queries with adaptive quotas | | Cache Speedup | 365.7x | Massive latency reduction for recurring architecture queries | | Commercial License Safety | 95.2% | Automatic filtering of GPL / CC-BY-NC restrictive licenses | | PyPI Download Signal Rate | 52.4% | Over half of returned candidates enriched with production downloads | | Unit Test Coverage | 40 / 40 Passing | Comprehensive suites for normalizer, PyPI client, cache, and query relaxation | 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: Print active version skills-but-for-dev --version Ping server and verify token discovery source ENV vs GitHub CLI skills-but-for-dev ping For mathematical formulas star velocity moving averages, exponential recency decay, dormant spike detection ratios , see ARCHITECTURE.md //ARCHITECTURE.md . Distributed under the Apache License 2.0 https://dev.toLICENSE .