garrytan/gstack · warning · Error

Usage: $B skill show <name>

Error message

Usage: $B skill show <name>

What it means

Thrown by handleShow when args[0] is falsy — the caller invoked `$B skill show` with no skill name. It is a usage guard so the daemon returns a clean usage string instead of attempting a lookup on an undefined name (which readBrowserSkill would otherwise turn into a misleading 'not found').

Source

Thrown at browse/src/browser-skill-commands.ts:112

  for (const s of skills) {
    const desc = (s.frontmatter.description ?? '').slice(0, 40);
    lines.push(
      [
        s.name.padEnd(30),
        s.tier.padEnd(8),
        s.frontmatter.host.padEnd(28),
        desc,
      ].join(' '),
    );
  }
  return lines.join('\n') + '\n';
}

// ─── show ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────

function handleShow(args: string[], ctx: SkillCommandContext): string {
  const name = args[0];
  if (!name) throw new Error('Usage: $B skill show <name>');
  const tiers = ctx.tiers ?? defaultTierPaths();
  const skill = readBrowserSkill(name, tiers);
  if (!skill) throw new Error(`Skill "${name}" not found in any tier.`);
  return readFile(path.join(skill.dir, 'SKILL.md'));
}

function readFile(p: string): string {
  return fs.readFileSync(p, 'utf-8');
}

// ─── run ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

interface ParsedRunArgs {
  passthrough: string[];
  timeoutSeconds: number;
}

export function parseSkillRunArgs(args: string[]): ParsedRunArgs {

View on GitHub (pinned to 94993f7401)

Solutions

1. Re-run with a name: `$B skill show <name>`.
2. List available skills first with `$B skill list` to copy a valid name.
3. If calling handleSkillCommand programmatically, ensure args contains the subcommand AND its operand: ['show', 'hn-frontpage'].

Example fix

// before
$B skill show
// after
$B skill show hn-frontpage

function requireSkillNameArg(args: string[], sub: string): string {
  const name = args[0];
  if (!name) throw new Error(`Usage: $B skill ${sub} <name>`);
  return name;
}
// before calling handleShow:
const name = requireSkillNameArg(rest, 'show');

When it happens

Trigger: handleSkillCommand(['show'], ctx) or handleSkillCommand(['show',''], ctx) — the subcommand resolves to 'show' but args.slice(1) has no non-empty first element. Equivalent to running `$B skill show` from the CLI with nothing after the subcommand.

Common situations: Agent or human types the command incompletely; a calling script trims args and passes an empty array; shell quoting eats the argument; programmatic caller forgets to append the name.

Related errors

• Usage: $B skill run <name> [--arg k=v]... [--timeout=Ns]
• Usage: $B skill test <name>
• Usage: $B skill rm <name> [--global]
• Skill "${name}" not found in any tier.
• Skill "${name}" not found.

AI-assisted analysis of garrytan/gstack@94993f7401 (2026-08-12). Data as JSON: /api/errors/762b324b388da14a. Report an issue: GitHub.