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startup concept

Skillvane

Version control and regression tests for the skills your agents load

Skillvane is a registry and CI service for SKILL.md folders and MCP server configs: it versions them, runs them against Claude, Codex, Copilot and Cursor on every model release, flags behavioral drift, and pins or rolls back with one call.

11

similar startups, last 2 years (31 all-time)

yes

8 matching federal grants and programs

Direction supported by government programs and grants

Test it before you build it

$400 · 3 weeks · 25 prospects

For $400 and three weeks, prove that teams sharing a Claude Code skills repo will pay $149 up front for a drift audit and prepay a founding month of automated regression runs.

Riskiest assumption · Small teams sharing a Claude Code skills repo lose enough hours to silent skill breakage after model releases that they will pay up front for regression runs instead of eyeballing failures or waiting for the assistant vendors to build testing in

1Focus group: who and where

The engineering lead of a 2-10 person team that keeps a shared .claude/skills repo their whole team loads into Claude Code, Cursor or Copilot, who spent hours this month figuring out why a skill behaved differently after a model release

where to find 25 · GitHub code search for public repos containing SKILL.md and .claude/skills folders, contacting the maintainers directly; the claude-code channels of the official Anthropic Discord and r/ClaudeAI threads about skills breaking after releases; AI Tinkerers monthly meetups in SF, NYC or Seattle for in-person pitches

2Sell first, build later

A $149 drift audit of the team's skills repo across four assistants with a written diff report in 5 business days, then a founding plan that runs the same tests automatically on every model release for up to 15 skills, starting October 2026

the ask · $149 one-time for the audit; $50 per month prepaid for the founding plan, locked for a year

a real yes · A real yes is $149 charged before any work starts, or a $50 founding month prepaid on the readout call; GitHub stars, 'this should exist' replies and requests for a free beta are not

3Small experiments

The first one attacks the riskiest assumption; each ends with a number that says whether to run the next.

  1. 1. Maintainer drift interviews

    $0 · 7 days

    Pull 25 active public repos with SKILL.md folders via GitHub code search, plus posters in the Anthropic Discord complaining about skill behavior changing. DM or email the maintainers referencing their specific repo and book 12 twenty-minute calls. Ask when a model release last broke a skill, how they found out, how long it cost them, and what they do today before pinning a model version.

    keep going if · 7 of 12 describe a concrete skill breakage after a model release in the last 90 days that cost them an hour or more

  2. 2. Priced audit page

    $60 · 10 days

    One-page site: a $149 drift audit of your skills repo, run across Claude, Codex, Copilot and Cursor on the current and previous model versions, exact diffs in a written report within 5 business days. Pitch it directly to the 12 interviewees and 8 more maintainers from the GitHub list; checkout on the page. Money charged is the only metric.

    keep going if · 5 of 20 directly pitched teams pay $149

  3. 3. Deliver audits, upsell founding plan

    $340 · 10 days

    For each paying team, run their skills by hand through the assistant CLIs against both model versions, write the diff report, and deliver it on a 30-minute readout call. At the end of the call offer the founding plan: automated runs on every model release, up to 15 skills, $50 a month prepaid, price locked for a year, with the $149 credited against it.

    keep going if · 3 of 5 audit buyers prepay the $50 founding month on the readout call

4Collect a deposit up front

Tesla took $1,000 refundable reservations for the Model 3 and $100 for the Cybertruck before building either: the deposit is the measurement, not the revenue.

$149

per prospect, refundable

how · The audit fee itself, invoiced up front through the checkout page before any work begins, because a small dev team will pay for a concrete deliverable long before they subscribe to infrastructure; the $149 credits toward the first founding month set up: Stripe Invoicing ↗

what it reserves · An audit slot in the next 5 business days, the written drift report, a 30-minute readout call, and the $50 founding price locked for a year if they subscribe

refund · Refunded in full if the report is more than 2 business days late or the team cancels before repo access is granted

target · 5 paid audits from 20 direct pitches within 21 days

Go: build it if

7 of 12 maintainers report a recent costly breakage, 5 of 20 pay $149, and 3 of 5 buyers prepay the $50 founding month: build the CI service

Kill: stop if

Fewer than 4 of 12 can name a real breakage, or 1 or fewer audits sell after 20 direct pitches: teams eyeball drift for free and wait for Anthropic to ship this, stop

5 Scripts to run itoutreach message, landing copy, deposit terms · click to open

outreach message

Your team keeps shared skills in a repo, and every Claude, Codex or Cursor model release can silently change how those skills behave. I run your skills against the current and previous model versions across all four assistants and send you a drift report with exact diffs: $149, delivered within five business days. Before that, I'd value 20 minutes on how the last release treated your repo, whatever you decide about the audit. Do you have a slot this week?

landing page

Did the last model release quietly break your agent skills? $149 buys a full drift audit of your skills repo across four assistants, report in 5 business days. Book your audit - refunded in full if the report is late.

deposit terms

$149 is charged today and buys a drift audit of up to 15 skills, with a written diff report and a 30-minute readout within 5 business days of granting repo access. It credits in full toward your first founding-plan month if you subscribe. Refunded entirely if the report is more than 2 business days late or you cancel before we get repo access.

Would you run this test?

One tap. The yes-share feeds the Demand pillar of this idea's score; nobody sees who answered.

Budgets are out-of-pocket estimates for a team of one to three, US market. Size the deposit to the deal, and check the terms before taking money in a regulated line.

Scorecard

Ranked against every idea in the catalog: trend, demand and 100x potential from the corpus, competition relative to the other ideas. A generated concept has no judges or swipes yet, so its pillars use the data signals only.

62

Idea Score, 0-100 · raw 38.2 x 1.61

Crowded

competition: more crowded than 80% of ideas · headwind x0.60

+4.8

government priorities, secondary (154 matching grants)

Trend

51

Is the wave forming now? 2025-26 entrants vs 2023-24, rounds since 2025, the sector's live-batch direction, the 2026 trend analyst.

  • Entrants 2025-26 vs 2023-24 (similar companies)54
  • Rounds announced 2025+ in the sector0
  • Rounds announced 2025+ matching the idea99
  • Sector direction (live batch)50

Demand

65

Does anyone want it? YC's current RFS, companies already paid for something similar, the operator judge, founders' yes-rate in decks, readers who would run the test.

  • YC asks for it (current RFS: idea / sector)30
  • Someone already pays (similar companies, recent / all-time)100

100x potential

53

Can it return a fund? The venture judge (double weight), market-size and moat axes, neighbours still alive, the technologist judge.

  • Neighbours still alive53

Score = 100 x cbrt(Trend x Demand x 100x) x (1 - 0.5 x crowding) + government bonus (max 5), calibrated so the 95th-percentile idea scores 90 (order never changes). A geometric mean: a weak pillar cannot be papered over. Percentiles are among the 382 ideas in the catalog; the terms matched were version, control, regression, tests, skills, load, registry, skill.

The concept in full

What
Skillvane is a registry and CI service for SKILL.md folders and MCP server configs: it versions them, runs them against Claude, Codex, Copilot and Cursor on every model release, flags behavioral drift, and pins or rolls back with one call. In the first hour a user points it at their skills folder, gets everything versioned, and sees a baseline test run across the assistants they use.
Grounded in (2025-2026 signals)
Agent Skills open standard at agentskills.io since December 18, 2025, with about 40 supporting products by June 2026; MCP at 10,000 active servers as of the December 9, 2025 donation; a skill-creator skill already writes skills, so the corpus of untested skills grows daily.
What it rides
'Agent Skills: launched October 16, 2025, an open standard since December 18': the brief says skills can be 'built, tested, versioned, installed, audited and sold', but the testing and versioning tooling behind that sentence does not exist yet.
Why now
The standard is eight months old as of August 2026 and already runs in about 40 products, so one skill now executes on many models that each update on their own schedule; every frontier release silently changes skill behavior and there is no CI equivalent to catch it.
Wedge: first customer and entry point
Small teams of Claude Code users who share a skills repository; the entry point is a drop-in check that runs on every commit to the skills folder, priced per skill per month, built by a 1-3 person team on top of existing assistant CLIs.
Closest real companies, as the generator saw them
Quantstruct (yc W25) tests and improves stale product docs, not agent skills. Mastra (yc W25) is a framework for authoring your own agents; Skillvane tests skills that run inside other companies' assistants. Confident AI (yc W25) evaluates LLM applications, not installable skill packages.
Main risk
Anthropic folds testing and versioning into the official skill-creator toolchain and the standard's steward owns the CI layer.

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Public money in this direction

US federal grants and open opportunities matched to the concept's terms.

Other concepts in this collection

Fictional concept generated 2026-08-26 by claude-fable-5 from the collection's brief and MarkosWeb data. Treat it as a research prompt, not a plan.