Scaffold Cli

This scaffolds a complete TypeScript CLI project with all the modern tooling decisions already made: dual ESM builds (CLI binary plus library exports), tsdown for bundling, oxlint and oxfmt via ultracite, changesets for versioning, vitest for testing, and GitHub Actions for CI and npm publishing. It targets Node 22+ and includes an AGENTS.md file plus a full skill definition in the output, which is a nice touch if you're building tools meant to be used by Claude. The anti-patterns section is actually useful, it calls out the ESM-only requirement and warns against adding chalk when Node's built-in styleText does the job. Saves you an hour of yak shaving when you just want to start a new CLI tool.

skills.sh installs: 751
GitHub stars: 191
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add mblode/agent-skills --skill scaffold-cli --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Scaffold CLI

IS: bootstrapping a brand-new TypeScript CLI or npm package (Node 24, TypeScript 7) from the pinned templates in references/, through to a green first CI run and a package npm can publish over OIDC.
IS NOT: a Next.js web app (use scaffold-nextjs), folder structure or module contracts for an existing codebase (use codebase-architecture), auditing an existing CLI's ergonomics (use dx-audit), or shipping a release of an existing package (use autoship).

The templates encode the house toolchain. Substitute project values and verify template APIs against installed package versions; repair proven incompatibilities instead of blindly reproducing them. The toolchain is the opinion: tsdown not tsup, vitest not jest, oxlint and oxfmt via ultracite not eslint or prettier, node:util styleText not chalk, @clack/prompts not ora. Swapping any of them or restructuring the layout produces a repo the templates' notes no longer describe.