docs: rework the README header, features, and pitch

[harlan-zw]

❓ Type of change

• 📖 Documentation

📚 Description

The feature list was selling the registry, not the CLI. "Every Skill has a human author" describes what skilld.dev is; someone deciding whether to run npx skilld cannot act on it. That claim already lives in the tagline and in "What is skilld?", so it stays there and leaves the list. The five now cover what you get from the binary: transient runs, multi-target install, startup, pinning, and privacy.

Two numbers are sourced rather than adjectives. AGENT_TARGETS in crates/skilld-core/src/target.rs holds 19 entries, so the install bullet says 19. Startup is hyperfine -N ./target/release/skilld --version: 454 µs ± 73 µs here, against 12.8 ms for a bare node -e "". The bullet says "under a millisecond" rather than the raw figure, since a README number gets quoted back on hardware I have not tested.

The header had the title, the badges, the tagline and the logo in four separate blocks, with the logo stranded below the tagline. It is one centred lockup now. logo.svg already had the mark and the word side by side, but drew the word as SVG <text> in IBM Plex Mono, which GitHub and npm cannot load, so it would have fallen back to whatever monospace the reader has. Both wordmarks are outlined to paths now, so they render identically with no font dependency, and the viewBox is cropped to the artwork instead of carrying 130px of dead space. Nothing else in the repo referenced those two files. Screenshots of both themes are in a comment below.

Badges were color=yellow against a rose and stone brand, so they now use #e11d48 on #1c1917, taken from logo-light.svg. Image URLs are absolute, because relative paths do not resolve on npmjs.com; the old logo was already broken there.

The repo description moved to "open-source, privacy friendly" and the README and package.json were still running two older pitches between them. All three say the same thing now. The skills.sh comparison stays on the GitHub description, where someone is searching; on our own README it would send the reader off to look up a competitor.

Open question: bin/skilld.mjs spawns through Node on the npm path, so "no runtime to install" only holds for the curl install. The bullet says curl for that reason, but the npm loader may be worth naming out loud somewhere.

Still missing: there is no COPY.md, which is why three descriptions drifted apart without anyone noticing. Worth bootstrapping separately.

🤖 AI disclosure: Harlan Agent Kit modified this description. My AI open-source policy.

[harlan-github-agent]

🤖 MERGED

Harlan Agent Kit posted this automated review. It is not Harlan's personal review or approval. AI open source policy. Last updated: 2026-09-22 08:41 UTC.

GitHub merged this pull request.

No material findings were recorded.

785afc6a-4ee8-4edb-94a1-53c0140da815

[harlan-zw]

The wordmark is inline with the heading now, and its text is outlined to paths, so nothing depends on IBM Plex Mono being available. Rendered through POST /markdown with mode=gfm and GitHub's own stylesheet, on the branch raw URLs.

Light	Dark

GitHub keeps align="center", <picture> and <source> through its sanitiser, so the theme swap works and the mark picks up #fb7185 on dark.