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flins
flins is the first dedicated dependency manager for the “Agent Skills” open standard. Just as npm manages JavaScript packages, flins manages the capabilities of your AI coding assistants. It solves the problem of fragmentation by providing a single command-line interface to install, update, and configure skills—such as database access, web search, or deployment tools—across multiple AI environments simultaneously.
Core Features
- Universal Skill Management: Users can install a skill once using
flins add [skill], and it automatically configures the necessary settings for all supported agents on the machine (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf). - Cross-Agent Synchronization: Ensures that if you update a tool for one agent, it is instantly available to others, maintaining a consistent developer experience regardless of which AI you are using.
- Registry & Git Support: Skills can be installed from the official registry or directly from any Git repository, allowing teams to share private internal tools easily.
- Dependency Handling: Automatically manages versioning and updates, preventing “skill drift” where different team members are using different versions of the same agent capabilities.
How It Works
Developers install flins globally. To give their AI agent a new capability—for example, the ability to query a PostgreSQL database—they simply run flins add postgres. flins fetches the skill definition (following the Agent Skills standard) and injects the configuration into the specific setup files for Claude, Cursor, and other installed agents. The next time the user opens their AI editor, the “postgres” tool is immediately available for the agent to use.
Best Use Cases
- Team Standardization: Engineering teams can include a
flins.jsonmanifest in their repo, ensuring every developer’s AI agent has the exact same set of approved tools and permissions. - Rapid Tool Switching: Developers who bounce between Cursor for coding and Claude Code for terminal tasks can keep their AI toolkits perfectly synced.
- Private Internal Tools: Companies can distribute proprietary agent skills (like internal API access) via private Git repos without complex manual setup guides.
Pros and Cons
- Pros: Drastically simplifies the configuration of MCP servers and Agent Skills; familiar
npm-like syntax lowers the barrier to entry; open-source and vendor-agnostic. - Cons: Effectiveness relies on the adoption of the Agent Skills standard by toolmakers; adds an abstraction layer that may hide configuration details from power users.
Pricing
Free (Open Source): flins is completely free to use and open source. There are no paid tiers for the CLI tool itself.
How Does It Compare?
- Smithery: Smithery is primarily a registry and discovery platform for MCP servers. While it offers installation commands, flins focuses on the local management workflow and cross-agent synchronization rather than just discovery.
- Glama: Similar to Smithery, Glama is a marketplace for finding agent tools. flins is the “package manager” you use to install what you find on these platforms into your actual development environment.
- Manual Configuration: Without flins, developers must manually edit JSON config files (like
claude_desktop_config.json) for each agent. flins automates this error-prone process. - Vercel AI SDK: Vercel offers libraries to build agents, whereas flins is a tool to manage the tools those agents use.
Final Thoughts
As AI agents move from experimental chatbots to integrated development partners, managing their “capabilities” is becoming as critical as managing code dependencies. flins effectively fills this gap, offering a sane, standardized way to equip your AI workforce with the tools they need. For teams already juggling multiple AI assistants, it is an essential utility to ensure consistency and reduce configuration headaches.