AI Agent Skill for NOstr Projects

Feed me to your clanker

1st draft by JBN. Will maintain by asking clanker occasionally for landscape changes.

An agent skill for building on Nostr — protocol facts, current NIP status, deprecations, relay strategy, messaging, commerce, tooling, and a set of stated principles for the judgment calls that specs don't settle.

Written for AI coding agents and readable by humans. Every factual claim is checked against the live NIPs index rather than model memory, and dated.

Most Nostr material an agent has absorbed is out of date. NIP-04 is deprecated, NIP-96 was replaced by Blossom, nsites moved off kind 34128, NIP-15 lost to NIP-99, and the commonly published kind-range table is wrong in a way that matters. This document exists to correct that, and to be corrected in turn.

Read

Start with SKILL.md — it routes you to the rest. Files are served as raw markdown, which is what an agent wants; point yours straight at these URLs.

SKILL.md The router. Authorities, cypherpunk defaults, judgment calls, MCP tools, unrecommended NIPs, kind selection, what's still evolving.
references/protocol.md NIP-01: exact kind ranges, event IDs, tag discipline, filters, relay messages.
references/identity-and-safety.md NIP-19, displaying people, NIP-05, moderation, deletion, onboarding and key safety.
references/lists-and-sets.md NIP-51 — read before inventing a kind.
references/relays.md Relay types, NIP-11 limits, outbox model, Welshman, backoff, being a good citizen.
references/messaging.md NIP-17, Marmot, Cordn, Concord, NIP-29, ContextVM.
references/storage-and-sites.md Blossom, nsites (NIP-5A), napplets (NIP-5D).
references/commerce-and-content.md NIP-99, payments, ecash, long-form and publications.
references/libraries-and-tooling.md Libraries by language, signing, Soapbox/Ditto toolchain, ngit, Buzz.
references/sources.md Other published agent skills, their known errors, and the link index.
README.md Overview, authority order, full credits.
LICENSE CC BY-SA 4.0.

Where this lives

This page is an nsite — NIP-5A, kind 35128. Files live on Blossom, addressed by keypair. No DNS registrar, no hosting account, no single server to seize.

clone git clone nostr://npub1v89nr2zax8ef0ceyu9te0sjyqv3newa3e82m0rd4kye3ekeyhv2sqf30cc/relay.ngit.dev/nostr-skill

npub npub1v89nr2zax8ef0ceyu9te0sjyqv3newa3e82m0rd4kye3ekeyhv2sqf30cc

site nostr-skill

Source is published over ngit / NIP-34 and mirrored across four independent hosts — relay.ngit.dev, gitnostr.com, ngit.danconwaydev.com, and a GitHub mirror. Browse, file issues, and send PRs at gitworkshop.dev, or on GitHub.

GitHub is a mirror, not the source of truth. If it disappears, three GRASP servers still serve the code and this site still resolves. That is the argument of the document, applied to itself.

Credit

Everything here describes work other people built and gave away for free. Attribution is cheap; a healthy commons is not. So, in full:

fiatjaf — the protocol itself, khatru, nak, nos2x, awesome-nostr
jb55 (Will Casarin) — damus, notedeck, nostril, nostr-js
hzrd149 — blossom and its BUDs, applesauce, applesauce-concord, noStrudel, the NIP-5A nsite spec
hodlbod — coracle, welshman, and the relay-selection thinking most clients now borrow
mikedilger — NIP-65 and the outbox model, gossip, chorus, relay-tester
jeffg (erskingardner) — marmot, whitenoise, NIP-99
Max Hillebrand — whitenoise, with jeffg
vitorpamplona — amethyst, quartz
alex gleason — nostrify, ditto, mkstack, shakespeare, nostrbook, soapbox, and the nostr-skills this document's structure learns from
dskvr / sandwich — nostr-watch and NIP-66, nsyte, napplet and NIP-5D, cordn-adhoc-cvm, and monitoring stations on six continents
hoytech (Doug Hoyte) — strfry, and negentropy, which became NIP-77
greenart7c3 — Amber and NIP-55, Citrine, Morganite
Silberengel / Laeserin — GitCitadel, Alexandria, the NKBIPs
DanConwayDev — ngit, NIP-34 tooling, gitworkshop.dev
Pablof7z — NDK
purrgrammer — grimoire and its nostr skill
derekross — nostrplebs, nostrnests, zappix, plektos, yakbak, zaptrax, zaplytics, podstr
bitkarrot — HiveTalk, swarm, sendsats
calle — Cashu, underneath NIP-60 and NIP-61
franzap — zapstore
v0l / Kieran — snort, zap.stream, void.cat
rabble — nos.social
vcavallo — nstrfy.sh, attestr
MK Fain — MKStack
Nogringo — Dart NDK, a privacy-focused relay, Dart NIP-77
KotlinGeekDev — Kotlin Multiplatform completeness
Anderson Juhasc — Nostrord
Barry Deen — Wisp
YakiHonne — client and Blossom server
gzuuus — dvmcp, nutoff-wallet
Jack Dorsey / Block — bitchat, Buzz, and funding much of the above
Open Markets Foundation — the NIP-99 / Gamma Markets commerce specs
Eric FJ and Sync — the Open Markets Podcast
The Concord, Cordn, and ContextVM authors, and everyone who has argued a NIP into shape in a pull request thread

And OpenSats, which funds a large share of the people on this list.

If you built something described here and aren't named, that's an error worth an issue — not a slight.