Detailed Analysis
A developer operating under the handle khendzel has released version 1.3 of skills-janitor, a open-source audit tool designed to inventory and deduplicate skills within Claude Code environments. The update corrects a significant architectural blind spot present since the tool's initial release six weeks prior: the original scanner only examined the `~/.claude/skills/` directory while ignoring `~/.claude/plugins/`, the location where skills installed through Claude Code's `/plugin install` command actually reside. On the developer's own machine, this omission rendered 122 skills invisible, suppressing the reported skill count from 157 down to just 35 — a gap of roughly 78 percent.
The correction carries practical weight because the plugin pathway appears to be the dominant installation vector for power users. The developer's machine held several substantial plugin-distributed skill packages including a marketing-skills bundle containing 40 discrete skills, alongside tools for Figma integration, Vercel deployment, interface design, and a package called "impeccable." The distinction between the two storage locations reflects how Claude Code's plugin marketplace architecture separates individually authored skills from curated, bundled collections — a structural split that the tool's first version failed to account for.
Beyond simple counting, version 1.3 introduces a duplicate detection mechanism that leverages Jaccard similarity scoring to surface semantically redundant skills across storage locations. The illustrative case the developer highlights is an older user-scope `marketing-seo-audit` skill that existed alongside an equivalent skill embedded within the marketing-skills plugin bundle, scoring a 98 percent Jaccard match. Both skills were loading into context simultaneously and triggering on similar prompts — a form of silent redundancy that could produce inconsistent or doubled outputs without the user being aware of the conflict.
The tool's existence and the nature of this bug collectively reflect a broader challenge emerging around Claude Code's extensibility ecosystem: as plugin marketplaces lower the barrier to skill installation, users accumulate large, heterogeneous skill inventories across multiple storage paths with limited native visibility into what is actually loaded. The discoverability gap khendzel encountered — where the authoritative list of active skills was split across at least two directories — suggests the tooling infrastructure around Claude Code's skill management layer is still maturing. Third-party utilities filling audit and hygiene functions are a characteristic sign of a platform ecosystem reaching the complexity threshold where management overhead becomes meaningful.
skills-janitor is distributed freely via the Claude Code plugin marketplace and requires only bash and Python 3 with no additional dependencies, lowering the barrier for adoption among developers already operating within that environment. The developer's closing prompt — asking how many skills others actually have once plugins are counted — suggests the discrepancy between perceived and actual skill inventory may be a widespread, underappreciated condition rather than an edge case, pointing to a category of tooling that may see increased demand as Claude Code's plugin ecosystem continues to expand.
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