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Agents

Wikidown ships drop-in configs so AI coding assistants can maintain your wiki by running the wikidown CLI without you wiring anything up by hand.

The CLI is the agent surface

There is no separate agent protocol: every config below tells the assistant to shell out to wikidown — list, read (with --section), write, edit, write-section, append, new, move, delete, reorder, search, walk, plus check-links — instead of editing /docs/*.md directly, so .order files, breadcrumbs, and link targets stay consistent. Any host that can run a shell command (Claude Code, Copilot in VS Code or on github.com, the Copilot coding agent) gets the full read/write surface. Hosts that can't (Claude Desktop, a VS Code chat mode without terminal access) can't edit the wiki directly; the skill still carries the command list, so they can suggest the exact wikidown commands for you to run instead.

Shared skill

Claude and Copilot share one skill file in the Agent Skills standard format: agents/skills/wikidown/SKILL.md. It carries the format rules, a wikidown command cheat sheet (which verb to reach for and when), the editing workflow, kanban boards, PDF export, publishing the site, site templates and _data files for docs and marketing sites (what goes in pages versus data versus layouts), clickable image maps, and a manual last-resort protocol for locked-down machines where the CLI can't run (no .NET plus an execution policy blocking the self-contained binary) — breadcrumb format, .order bookkeeping, and the move/delete invariants, so an agent can still edit correctly and flag the edits for later wikidown check-links verification. The same command list is what a shell-less host uses to suggest commands rather than run them.

• Claude Code loads it from .claude/skills/wikidown/SKILL.md.
• GitHub Copilot loads it from .github/skills/wikidown/SKILL.md.

Claude Code

In agents/claude/, layered on top of the shared skill:

• wikidown.subagent.md → .claude/agents/wikidown-editor.md — a subagent definition that owns /docs/*.md reads and writes.
• CLAUDE.md snippet — append to your project's root CLAUDE.md so every Claude session knows to delegate wiki edits.

Copilot

In agents/copilot/, layered on top of the shared skill:

• copilot-instructions.md → .github/copilot-instructions.md — repo-wide guidance.
• wikidown.agent.md → .github/agents/wikidown.agent.md — a custom agent, also used by the Copilot coding agent on github.com.
• wikidown.chatmode.md → .github/chatmodes/wikidown.chatmode.md — a custom chat mode focused on wiki editing. When the chat mode has no terminal it suggests the wikidown commands to run rather than running them.

Install

The recommended install is the CLI:

dotnet tool install -g Wikidown.Cli
wikidown init --agents all

--agents accepts claude, copilot, all, or none. Existing files are skipped unless you pass --force; an existing CLAUDE.md gets the wiki section appended if it doesn't mention the wiki already.

Without .NET

The install scripts on wikidown.org fall back to a self-contained wikidown binary when dotnet isn't on PATH — nothing else to install:

curl -fsSL https://wikidown.org/install.sh | sh
wikidown init --agents all

irm https://wikidown.org/install.ps1 | iex
wikidown init --agents all

init scaffolds the same configs either way, and the agents run the same wikidown commands — the self-contained binary provides them (installed to ~/.wikidown/bin, or %USERPROFILE%\.wikidown\bin on Windows). If a local execution policy blocks even that binary, the skill's last-resort protocol keeps wiki maintenance possible with plain file edits.

Manual copying still works: the agents/README.md maps each source file to its destination. Once installed, the agents run wikidown commands rather than editing files by hand, so .order files, breadcrumbs, and link targets stay consistent.

Keeping configs current

These files are copied once, not auto-updated. See Updating for how to re-run wikidown init --agents all --force to pick up config changes shipped in newer Wikidown releases.