Title: Sharing Agent Skills with APM Profiles, Inheritance, and Private Repos URL Source: https://blog.hem.si/blog/2026-09-02-personal-dev-skills/ Markdown Content: --- title: Sharing Agent Skills with APM Profiles, Inheritance, and Private Repos description: One APM-managed skills repo with inheriting profiles (dev-base, dev-go, dev-web) that works the same for public sharing and enterprise private repos. image: https://blog.hem.si/blog-placeholder-1.jpg --- 02.09.2026 # Sharing Agent Skills with APM Profiles, Inheritance, and Private Repos [Get Site as Markdown ](https://markdown.new/https://blog.hem.si/blog/2026-09-02-personal-dev-skills/) --- The more I work with agents — alone or in a team — the more I want to share skills across projects instead of copying them. In a team this matters more: you want quality-assured skills everyone uses, not five variants drifting apart. That quickly creates one requirement: profiles, ideally with inheritance. A Go developer environment needs the base developer conventions plus Go extras; a docs repo needs base plus writing extras. Microsoft’s [APM](https://microsoft.github.io/apm/quickstart/) implements exactly this model: skills live in a shared package, profiles compose them via dependencies. One line, like `apm install dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/profiles/dev-go`, adds a whole agent profile to a folder. That really simplifies the setup for new projects and ensures consistency across different environments. I published my starting point at [dhcgn/personal-dev-skills](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills). The second requirement came from enterprise work: the same mechanism had to work with non-public repos, without a second toolchain. See the documentation for the various ways to add APM packages. Below I show what I built, how profiles work as an implicit feature — a folder with an `apm.yml` that depends on other packages — and how to consume those skill packages. I am still at the beginning with this setup; the repo will evolve fast, so check back there for the current state. ## Prerequisites * `apm` CLI ([install](https://microsoft.github.io/apm/getting-started/installation/)) * My Repo: [dhcgn/personal-dev-skills](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills) * Targets in this repo: `opencode` (see `targets:` in profile manifests), because this is a good generic AI-agent target approach for various projects. ## How my repo is organized Two levels, details with the consumer story below: * `.apm/skills/` — the actual primitives (`rtk`, `gh`, `wsl`, `go-1-27-features`, `go-linq`, `glossary-*`, etc.). * `profiles//apm.yml` — thin compositions that depend on skills or on other profiles (`dev-go` and `dev-web` inherit `dev-base` and add only their delta). * Root `apm.yml` — umbrella package, currently only upstream deps. ## Consumer first: one install per project I use profiles from the consumer side. Producer details (how I compile them) come later — daily work is install and update. ### 1\. I start a Go solution — one command Empty folder, Go project, agents with no conventions. I run: ```bash apm install dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/profiles/dev-go ``` That is the whole setup. I get all skills of `dev-go` _and_ my baseline developer profile, because `dev-go` depends on `dev-base`: ```yaml # profiles/dev-go/apm.yml (v1.2.0, excerpt) name: dev-go targets: - opencode dependencies: apm: - dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/profiles/dev-base - dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/.apm/skills/go-1-27-features - dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/.apm/skills/go-linq - dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/.apm/skills/go-newest-version - dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/.apm/skills/github-markdown-images - spf13/go-skills ``` No extra flag for the baseline. APM resolves transitively: `dev-go` pulls `dev-base`, `dev-base` pulls `ponytail` and my small helpers: ```yaml # profiles/dev-base/apm.yml (v1.2.0, excerpt) name: dev-base targets: - opencode dependencies: apm: - dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/.apm/skills/gh - dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/.apm/skills/rtk - dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/.apm/skills/wsl - dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/.apm/skills/glossary-init - dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/.apm/skills/glossary-create - dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/.apm/skills/glossary-search - DietrichGebert/ponytail ``` Other stacks are the same pattern: ```bash apm install dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/profiles/dev-base # baseline only apm install dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/profiles/dev-web # baseline + web delta ``` `dev-web` is currently just `dev-base` plus its own delta — inheritance keeps it one line: ```yaml # profiles/dev-web/apm.yml (v1.2.0) dependencies: apm: - dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/profiles/dev-base ``` There is no separate “profile” primitive. A profile is an implicit feature: a folder with an `apm.yml` that depends on other packages. ### 2\. What landed on disk ```bash apm list cat AGENTS.md ls .agents/skills ``` * `apm.yml` now lists the profile under `dependencies.apm`. * `apm.lock.yaml` pins exact commits and content hashes — teammates get the identical tree on `apm install`. * `AGENTS.md` starts with `` and contains the merged instructions (e.g. `rtk go test` prints failures only). * `.agents/skills/` holds the harness-neutral skills; `apm_modules/` is cache only (gitignored, rebuilt from the lockfile). ### 3\. Staying current Skills evolve. From the consumer side I only need two verbs ([Update and refresh](https://microsoft.github.io/apm/consumer/update-and-refresh/)): ```bash apm outdated # what moved upstream? apm update # refresh to latest matching refs (asks first) ``` To pin a known-good state I add a ref: ```yaml dependencies: apm: - dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/profiles/dev-go#v1.2.0 ``` Then `apm install` reproduces it, `apm update` moves it forward. I commit `apm.yml`, `apm.lock.yaml`, and the deployed files (`.agents/`, `AGENTS.md`) together. ## Skill inventory I referenced the same third-party skills in my profiles as needed and added some of my own. My skills are listed at . ### My skills * [devcontainer-debug-windows](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/tree/main/.apm/skills/devcontainer-debug-windows) — Debug DevContainer startup failures on Windows with trace logging to `devcontainer-up.log`. * [devsecops-subdomain-finder](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/tree/main/.apm/skills/devsecops-subdomain-finder) — Enumerate subdomains of an apex domain via Certificate Transparency log search. * [encryption-and-cybersecurity-in-development](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/tree/main/.apm/skills/encryption-and-cybersecurity-in-development) — Encryption overview: use established libs, `age` format, KDFs, PoW, OWASP practices. * [gh](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/tree/main/.apm/skills/gh) — GitHub CLI patterns: structured `--json` output, pagination, search vs. list. * [gh-skill](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/tree/main/.apm/skills/gh-skill) — Manage agent skills with `gh skill` (discover, preview, install, update, publish). * [github-markdown-images](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/tree/main/.apm/skills/github-markdown-images) — README images must use HTML `` tags, not Markdown, for github.com rendering. * [glossary-create](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/tree/main/.apm/skills/glossary-create) — Add a term to a generated glossary: define once in code, `ref:` everywhere else. * [glossary-create-issue](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/tree/main/.apm/skills/glossary-create-issue) — Draft GitHub issues reusing glossary keys with repo-scoped code-search links. * [glossary-init](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/tree/main/.apm/skills/glossary-init) — Bootstrap a source-comment glossary (`go:generate`, topics, stale/broken-ref gates) from zero. * [glossary-search](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/tree/main/.apm/skills/glossary-search) — Search glossary key definitions and usages from bash/PowerShell (read-only). * [go-1-27-features](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/tree/main/.apm/skills/go-1-27-features) — Safe-to-use Go 1.25–1.27 language, runtime, and stdlib features. * [go-linq](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/tree/main/.apm/skills/go-linq) — LINQ-style queries via [ahmetb/go-linq/v5](https://github.com/ahmetb/go-linq) (Go 1.27+, type-safe). * [go-newest-version](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/tree/main/.apm/skills/go-newest-version) — Check latest Go version with `curl https://go.dev/VERSION?m=text`. * [image-analysis](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/tree/main/.apm/skills/image-analysis) — Check images for corruption/metadata with local tools (jpegtran, ffprobe, exiftool). * [lsp-setup](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/tree/main/.apm/skills/lsp-setup) — Install and configure an LSP server for Copilot CLI (vendored from [github/awesome-copilot](https://github.com/github/awesome-copilot)). * [markdown-from-website](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/tree/main/.apm/skills/markdown-from-website) — Fetch clean AI-ready Markdown via markdown.new instead of raw HTML. * [rtk](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/tree/main/.apm/skills/rtk) — Prefix shell commands with `rtk` to filter output before LLM context ([rtk-ai/rtk](https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk)). * [wsl](https://github.com/dhcgn/personal-dev-skills/tree/main/.apm/skills/wsl) — Run Linux on Windows via WSL, incl. path translation with `wslpath`. ## Links * * * * *