Safely deprecate, retire, or merge obsolete skills while preserving backward references and library clarity. Use when a user says 'deprecate this skill', 'retire this', or 'this is replaced by X', when a catalog audit identifies a skill for retirement, or when a skill is causing harm and needs immediate pull. Do not use when the skill needs improvement (use skill-improver) or when the repo doesn't support deprecation (just delete).
Safely deprecates a skill: updates state, adds notices, redirects references, preserves content for history.
Determine the reason:
# Search across repo
grep -r "<skill-name>" AGENTS.md **/SKILL.md skills-lock.json docs/ 2>/dev/null
# Check "Do NOT use when" sections in sibling skills
grep -r "Do NOT use" **/SKILL.md | grep -i "<skill-name>"
Replace with replacement skill pointer, or note "no replacement available".