read-github

What This Skill Does

The read-github skill integrates your OpenClaw agent with gitmcp.io to revolutionize how you interact with GitHub repositories. Unlike traditional web search or simple raw page scraping, this tool utilizes the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to access repositories as structured data. It provides semantic search capabilities, accurate file system navigation, and LLM-optimized documentation formatting. By acting as an interface between your agent and the gitmcp.io service, it eliminates hallucinations regarding folder structures and ensures that the information retrieved is clean, consistent, and respectful of web standards like robots.txt.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, execute the following command in your terminal:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/am-will/read-github

Ensure that your OpenClaw configuration allows the agent to execute the provided scripts/gitmcp.py utility to enable the underlying tool calls.

Use Cases

• Project Onboarding: Quickly parse README files and documentation to understand how to contribute to a new open-source codebase.
• Technical Research: Perform semantic searches across complex documentation sets to find specific architectural decisions or API definitions.
• Code Debugging: Use exact-match code searching to locate where specific functions are defined or implemented within a target repository.
• External Reference Tracking: Seamlessly follow and fetch external links cited within project docs without manual context switching.

Example Prompts

1. "Read the documentation for facebook/react and explain the core lifecycle methods described in their guides."
2. "Search the documentation for 'useMemo' in the facebook/react repository to see how it should be implemented in modern components."
3. "Look through the codebase of karpathy/llm-council for the implementation of the main loop and summarize how it handles input tokens."

Tips & Limitations

• Tip: Always run fetch-docs as your first step for any new repository. This populates the agent's knowledge base with the project's high-level architecture.
• Tip: Use search-code only when you need an exact implementation match; otherwise, rely on search-docs for more nuanced, semantic insights.
• Limitation: The skill depends on the gitmcp.io service; if the service is unreachable, the tool will return a connection error.
• Limitation: While semantic search is highly effective, large repositories may yield many matches; refine your queries with specific keywords to improve result relevancy.