Managing 150+ AI Agent Skills at Scale — What Broke, What I Built

A developer running 150+ autonomous AI agents (cron jobs, self-improvers, delegated coders) hit a wall with a flat-file skill registry: concurrent writes to a shared JSONL file caused data corruption, and grepping 153 SKILL.md files for the right procedure became unmanageable. The solution is Skill Forge, an open-source SQLite-backed CLI registry with WAL mode for concurrent-safe writes, FTS5 full-text search, and two-pass quality validation (frontmatter + structure checks). On first run, 51 of 153 skills were flagged with real issues. The tool indexes skills in place without modifying them, supports content-hash-based change detection, and ships with 89 tests running in 0.26 seconds. Stack: Python 3.11, Click, SQLite, PyYAML.