Agents seemed to have trouble finding the right calls to work with
branches (create, list, delete) and passing the right params to get it
to work. We probably don't need a big skill to get it on the right track
but a little nudge seems helpful. Doing a couple simple tasks, it saved
about half the time and tokens, so feels worthwhile. Created with the
Claude skills creator, hence the "skill.md in a bare folder"
organization - happy to move it if that's not the standard anymore.
```
Benchmark results (3 evals, with-skill vs baseline):
┌────────────────┬────────────┬────────────────────┐
│ Metric │ With skill │ Without skill │
├────────────────┼────────────┼────────────────────┤
│ Pass rate │ 3/3 (100%) │ 3/3 (100%) │
├────────────────┼────────────┼────────────────────┤
│ Avg time │ 51s │ 142s (2.8× slower) │
├────────────────┼────────────┼────────────────────┤
│ Avg tokens │ 19,305 │ 36,513 (47% more) │
├────────────────┼────────────┼────────────────────┤
│ Avg tool calls │ 5.7 │ 26 (4.5× more) │
└────────────────┴────────────┴────────────────────┘
```
Two skills to help people connect and manage their column metadata using
a server that implements the [REST
API](https://lance.org/format/catalog/rest/)
lancedb-column-metadata was built using the [Claude skill
creator](https://claude.com/plugins/skill-creator); without the skill it
was usually calling at least one method that didn't exist and usually
not setting "replace": "false". So, while the base case is already
pretty good, adding this skill improves things somewhat.
lancedb-connect should help with most agentic workflows, because
"finding all the things you need to connect to your server" can be the
hardest part.
Moves the Lance dependency bump process into an in-repository skill so
local agents and GitHub Actions share the same workflow definition.
The update workflow is now an explicit, optional-tag entrypoint;
latest-release resolution, duplicate PR handling, Java/Rust dependency
updates, and Sophon follow-up are documented in the skill and backed by
a small deterministic helper.
