How to enable the internal charter and skills

packs/internal/ holds the doctrine that governs how the core team works, plus four shared maintainer skills: kitty-land-pr, kitty-issue-triage, kitty-mission-from-issue and kitty-report-debrief. The pack never ships to consumers. This page gets it working in your clone.

Step 1: Register the pack

Add the pack to .kittify/config.yaml as an org pack:

charter_packs:
  org:
    packs:
    - name: internal
      local_path: packs/internal

This is the canonical shape. The retired doctrine.org.packs key is still read, but write the canonical one. This repository's own config already carries the entry.

The pack's org-charter.yaml sets skill_namespace: kitty and lists all four skills in required_skills, so registering the pack puts them in force. You do not run spec-kitty charter activate skill for them.

Step 2: Project the skills

mkdir -p .claude   # only if `claude` is a configured tool and .claude/ is missing (#4275)
spec-kitty upgrade

The SKILL.md files are not on disk until upgrade writes them into each configured tool's project skill root. See the root table in Create and activate a pack skill.

Step 3: Verify

Check that each tool's project skill root holds the four directories, for example:

ls .claude/skills .agents/skills | grep kitty-

You should see kitty-land-pr, kitty-issue-triage, kitty-mission-from-issue and kitty-report-debrief, each with a SKILL.md. Do not rely on spec-kitty doctor skills for this check (see below).

Known defects

Symptom	Cause	Workaround
`upgrade` fails with "Owner effect conflict" on `.claude`	`claude` is configured and the clone has no `.claude/` directory (#4275)	`mkdir .claude`, then run `upgrade` again. Projects that do not configure `claude` are not affected.
`doctor skills` reports healthy but a `kitty-*` directory is missing	`doctor skills` does not notice a pack skill in force that was never projected, and `--fix` does not project it (#5801)	Check the directories yourself after `upgrade`, as in Step 3.

After pulling the change that untracked the command-skill ledger

.kittify/command-skills-manifest.json is a per-machine ledger and is no longer tracked. Pulling the change that untracked it deletes your local copy, and spec-kitty doctor skills --fix then refuses because it sees unmanaged files. Do this once:

rm -rf .agents/skills/spec-kitty.*
spec-kitty doctor skills --fix
spec-kitty upgrade

The first command removes the generated spec-kitty.* command-skill directories. The fix rebuilds the ledger, and upgrade projects the kitty-* skills.