The Skills Marketplace Isn't Just a Demo Feature
When I first saw the Skills section in LacPointer I assumed it was one of those things that exists to make a landing page look full — a handful of toy integrations that nobody actually reaches for past day one. I installed GitHub mostly to test it. Three weeks later it's become part of how I triage my mornings.
Skills are installable mini tools that give the AI new abilities. You install one from the marketplace, hand over an API key if it needs one (stored encrypted, not readable after entry), and from that point the AI knows how to call it. No extra steps. You just ask naturally and it figures out when to use the skill. That part works better than I expected.
GitHub — The One I Use Most
My morning used to start with opening a browser tab, navigating to GitHub, clicking through to the repo, filtering issues assigned to me. By the time I was actually reading anything I'd already lost two minutes and somehow ended up on a Reddit thread. Classic.
Now I hit Option+Space, type "what issues are assigned to me on the lac-cli repo" and get a list in about two seconds. I can ask for open PRs, recent commits, or the status of a specific issue — all without leaving whatever I was doing. The GitHub skill handles the API calls and the AI formats the response sensibly.
It's not a full GitHub client. You can't merge PRs through it. But for the read-heavy part of the morning — orientation, triage, knowing what's on fire — it removes a lot of friction.
Hacker News Briefing — Five Minutes, Done
I used to keep a Hacker News tab open all day. That's a productivity sinkhole dressed up as "staying informed." The Hacker News Briefing skill gives me a digest on demand instead. "What's trending on HN today?" and I get the top stories with scores and a short read on what they're about.
I check it once in the morning and once after lunch. That's it. I'm more informed than I was when the tab was always open, because I'm actually reading the summary instead of half-reading ten threads while context-switching.
Weather — Dumber Than It Sounds, Useful Than You'd Think
I know. Weather. But hear me out. I work from home in Lagos and we do enough outdoor errands that a quick "will it rain this afternoon?" matters. The alternative is opening an app, waiting for location permission to kick in, and then closing it. The Weather skill answers in the same bar I'm already using for everything else. It takes under three seconds and I don't break focus.
Small thing. But the whole point of LacPointer is that small things add up.
Crypto Tracker — Actually Practical if You Hold Anything
I'm not a trader. I hold a few positions and I check prices maybe twice a day. The Crypto Tracker skill means I can ask "what's BTC and ETH at right now?" inside Option+Space and move on. No exchange tab, no price alert app. The AI pulls current prices and I'm done in ten seconds.
If you're actively trading this won't replace your setup. But if you just want a quick number without switching context it earns its place.
The Skills That Round Out a Workday
Beyond those four I have a few others installed that I reach for less often but genuinely appreciate when I need them:
- Currency Converter — We invoice in USD, I think in Naira. Quick conversions without a browser tab are genuinely useful for me.
- Dictionary — I write a lot. Sometimes I want a precise definition, not a search results page.
- Wikipedia — For quick factual lookups while writing. Faster than opening a browser, less distracting than searching.
- Trivia — Okay, this one's not productive. But it's fun when you need a thirty-second brain reset.
How the AI Decides Which Skill to Call
This is the part that makes the whole system work without you having to think about it. Each skill's tools have plain English descriptions — the AI reads those descriptions and decides when a question warrants calling a skill tool versus just answering from its own knowledge. You don't type a command or prefix. You just ask.
"What's the weather like in Lagos tomorrow?" → Weather skill. "Show me my open GitHub PRs" → GitHub skill. "What's 200 dollars in naira?" → Currency Converter. It routes correctly the vast majority of the time because the tool descriptions are written to be clear about scope.
When it gets it wrong — which does happen occasionally — it's usually because the question is ambiguous. Being slightly more specific fixes it immediately.
The Security Side Is Worth Knowing
Before I installed anything I wanted to know what the review process looked like. Every skill submission goes through ClamAV antivirus, static code analysis that blocks things like eval, dynamic imports, and filesystem writes, plus an npm audit. Simple single-domain skills get auto-approved. Anything that touches multiple domains or needs special permissions goes through manual review. Filesystem access is rejected outright.
That's a reasonable security model for something running on your machine and holding API keys. It's not perfect — nothing is — but it's not a wild-west marketplace either.
The Ones I Haven't Installed Yet
Country Info and Numbers are sitting in the marketplace and I haven't touched them yet. Urban Dictionary is there too — I can imagine exactly one situation where that's useful during work and it probably says something unflattering about my Slack messages. But it exists and somebody clearly wanted it.
Getting Started Takes About Two Minutes
Open LacPointer with Option+Space, head to the Skills section, and tap Install on anything that looks useful. If the skill needs an API key you'll enter it once and that's the last you'll think about it. The AI picks up the new capabilities immediately.
Start with GitHub if you're a developer. Start with Weather if you want something with zero setup. The marketplace is at lacai.io/marketplace — and if you want to build your own skill, the developer docs are at lacai.io/docs/skills.
Practical tip: install two or three skills, use them for a week, then come back and add more. Installing everything at once means you end up using nothing deliberately.