Not Every Skill Is Worth Installing
When I first found the Skills Marketplace, I installed everything. Weather, Crypto, GitHub, Trivia, Country Info, all of it. My LacPointer bar became this cluttered thing that felt like it was trying too hard. Then I went the other direction and stripped it back to just the skills I actually reach for in a real workday.
This isn't a list of every skill available. It's the four I kept, why I kept them, and one honest note about what skills can't do yet.
GitHub — The One I Use Most
I'm in and out of GitHub constantly. Checking PR status, looking up open issues, seeing what got merged overnight. Before I had the GitHub skill installed, that meant opening a browser tab, navigating to the right repo, finding the right filter. Not a big deal in isolation, but it adds up.
Now I just hit Option+Space and ask something like "what open PRs do I have assigned to me in lac-cli?" and it pulls them directly. No tab. No navigation. Just the answer.
It works because the skill gets the tool definitions injected into LacPointer's context automatically once you install it. You give it your GitHub token once during setup, it stores that encrypted, and from that point the AI knows exactly when to call the GitHub tool and when not to bother. If I ask about the weather, it doesn't try to hit GitHub. The routing just works.
The one thing I wish it could do is open a PR directly from the bar — right now it surfaces info but you still click through to take action. That's a skills limitation in general, not just this one.
Hacker News Briefing — My Morning Replacement
I used to open HN first thing every morning out of habit. Scroll for ten minutes, read half an article, close the tab feeling vaguely informed about nothing. I replaced that with the Hacker News Briefing skill.
I open LacPointer, say "give me the top five stories on Hacker News right now," and I get a quick summary with titles and links. Takes about twenty seconds. If something looks genuinely interesting I'll click through. Most mornings nothing does and I go back to actual work faster.
It sounds small. It's not small. The difference between "scroll until you feel like stopping" and "here are five things, done" is the difference between staying focused and losing thirty minutes.
Weather — Boring but Useful
Look, Weather is not exciting. But I work from home and I check it before I decide whether to go out for a run or grab lunch outside. Having it in the bar means I never unlock my phone for it, which means I don't end up reading notifications and losing the thread of what I was doing.
"What's the weather in Lagos today?" Right there. Back to work.
If you're the kind of person who checks weather on autopilot multiple times a day, this is worth the thirty seconds it takes to install.
Crypto Tracker — Only If You Actually Hold Crypto
I'm going to be straight: this one is situational. If you don't hold any crypto, skip it entirely. But if you do, it's actually solid. I ask something like "what's the price of ETH right now?" and it answers without me opening an exchange or a price site.
What I don't use it for is making decisions. It tells me a price. That's it. Don't expect analysis or alerts — it's a lookup tool, not a trading assistant.
The Ones I Removed
Trivia and Urban Dictionary are fun for about a day. Then you realize you're not actually using them for anything and they're just sitting there adding noise to the context. I removed both.
Country Info is genuinely useful if you work with clients across a lot of different regions and need to quickly check things like time zones, country codes, or dialing prefixes. I don't do that daily so I dropped it, but I can see why someone would keep it.
How to Actually Install Skills
Open LacPointer and navigate to the Skills section. Every skill in the marketplace has a one-tap install button. If it needs an API key (GitHub does, Weather does depending on the provider), you enter it once and it's stored with AES-256 encryption. After that you don't think about it again — the AI just knows what it can do.
The ones that don't need any credentials at all (Hacker News, Trivia, Quotes) install and work immediately with zero configuration. Those are good for testing whether you like the skill model before you start handing over any keys.
A Practical Tip on Skill Load
Every installed skill adds its tool definitions to the AI's context window. In practice this is fine with four or five skills installed. But if you install twelve, you're burning tokens on context that the model has to process on every single message, even when none of those skills are relevant. Keep it lean. Install what you actually use. The marketplace will still be there when you want something new.
My current setup: GitHub, Hacker News Briefing, Weather, Crypto Tracker. Four skills. That's it. If you want to browse what else is available, the full list is at lacai.io/marketplace.