Per-Project Skill Selection

Plugin enablement and skill toggles (see Skill Toggles) both live in the same workspace record, but neither answers a more basic question: should this skill even be a candidate for this project? Per-project selection is the outer gate that answers it.

A new workspace starts with nothing selected

Ptah keeps one editable copy of every skill you’ve ever acquired — from any plugin, on any project — under ~/.ptah/user/skills, one folder per machine. Without a per-project gate, every workspace you open would see the same pile: open a React project after enabling an Angular plugin somewhere else, and Ptah would hand your React agent Angular skills it has no use for.

So a workspace you open for the first time propagates no skills at all until you choose. This isn’t silence — the Dashboard shows a card:

No skills selected for this project yet Ptah keeps each project’s skills separate, so a new one starts empty rather than inheriting the last one’s. Pick what this project should hand to Claude, Codex, Copilot and Cursor.

Click Choose skills… to open the picker.

Choosing skills

The picker lives inside the same Configure Ptah Skills modal used for plugin enablement, in a new Skills for this project section above the plugin list:

• All of them — propagate everything the user layer offers. This is the escape hatch: pick it and you’re opted back out of the per-project gate, subject only to plugin enablement and any per-skill toggle you’ve set.
• Only the ones I pick — reveals a scrollable, flat list of every skill available across every plugin, with a live N of M skills selected count. Tick what this project should use.

Click Save Configuration to apply. The selection is saved together with your plugin config in one click.

If you’re upgrading

An existing workspace keeps everything it already had. The selection gate didn’t exist before this feature shipped, so on the first reconcile afterward Ptah checks whether any of its own manifests already record a skill copy in this workspace. If they do, that’s read as consent already given — this project resolves to All of them, and nothing is removed. You’ll never see the “no skills selected” card on a project that was already using skills.

Only a genuinely new workspace — one with no prior skill copies to lose — starts with Only the ones I pick, empty, waiting for a choice.

Headless and CI equivalents

The CLI mirrors the desktop picker exactly, going through the same RPC calls, so a headless machine and the desktop app never disagree about what a workspace propagates:

# Propagate everything (the "All of them" escape hatch)
ptah skill select --all

# Propagate only these
ptah skill select orchestration ui-ux-designer

# See the current mode, the recorded allowlist, and every candidate
ptah skill selection

ptah skill select requires either --all or at least one slug — there’s no default, because both 'all' and a narrowed selection are real decisions with real consequences (narrowing removes every skill copy not on the list).

Next steps

• Turn off individual skills
• Enable and disable plugins
• Change your selection later