vetskill: open-source scanner checks Claude Code Skills before installation

On October 27, 2026, a developer posted an open source tool called vetskill to DEV Community's AI section. It is meant to be run before you copy a skill folder into ~/.claude/skills, scanning the SKILL.md file and any bundled scripts for hidden instructions and credential-stealing risks. According to the author, one reason these risks go unnoticed is that models read HTML comments and Unicode tag characters as ordinary text, while such content does not render on GitHub pages, so browsing the README alone will not reveal it. The write-up also sketches a typical scenario: someone publishes a skill such as 'PDF tidy' or 'release notes', and after a user copies the folder into ~/.claude/skills, the next time they ask Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor something about PDFs, the model treats that SKILL.md as instructions and runs the scripts sitting next to it, with the user's shell, ~/.ssh, ~/.aws/credentials, gh token, and every API key in their environment in reach.

As for the project itself, the vetskill repo lives at github.com/bayuh85/vetskill. It is released under the MIT license, requires Python 3.10 or later, and depends only on the standard library with no third-party packages. It ships with 30 offline tests, and the author describes it as something you can run quickly in the gap between git clone and cp -r, that is, scanning a skill after you download it but before you drop it into your skills directory. Public material so far does not report any follow-up releases or wider adoption.