Tree-sitter Skill

SkillDev tools

Expert skill for creating tree-sitter grammars for incremental parsing and syntax highlighting

Instructions available. Your AI can read the instructions. Execution depends on the setup they require.

Account requirements not reviewed. Check the skill instructions before use; ahel provides instructions and does not run this skill.

Add ahel to your AI once: Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code or Codex. Then ask it to use this.

Then ask your AI: use the Tree-sitter Skill skill

What this skill tells your AI

The instructions your AI receives, as published by a5c-ai/babysitter in library/specializations/programming-languages/skills/tree-sitter/SKILL.md and read by ahel’s review.

Overview

Expert skill for creating tree-sitter grammars for incremental parsing and syntax highlighting.

Capabilities

Write tree-sitter grammar.js files
Handle tree-sitter external scanners
Design queries for syntax highlighting
Implement incremental parsing support
Handle tree-sitter error recovery
Generate bindings for various languages
Integrate with editors (VS Code, Neovim, Helix)
Test grammars with corpus files

Target Processes

language-grammar-design.js
lexer-implementation.js
parser-development.js
lsp-server-implementation.js

Dependencies

tree-sitter CLI
tree-sitter crates/npm packages

Usage Guidelines

Grammar.js: Follow tree-sitter grammar.js conventions
External Scanners: Use external scanners for context-sensitive lexing
Queries: Write highlight.scm and other query files for editor integration
Testing: Build comprehensive corpus test files
Error Recovery: Design grammar with error recovery in mind

Output Schema

{
  "type": "object",
  "properties": {
    "grammarName": { "type": "string" },
    "nodeTypes": {
      "type": "array",
      "items": { "type": "string" }
    },
    "queries": {
      "type": "array",
      "items": {
        "type": "string",
        "enum": ["highlights", "injections", "locals", "tags", "folds"]
      }
    },
    "bindings": {
      "type": "array",
      "items": { "type": "string" }
    },
    "generatedFiles": {
      "type": "array",
      "items": { "type": "string" }
    }
  }
}

Signals

GitHub stars: 2k
Forks: 112
Last commit: Sep 2026

Advanced

Item type: skill
Key: tree-sitter
Source: github.com/a5c-ai/babysitter

github.com/a5c-ai/babysitter