This is the human again - one other thing I wanted to mention is that you can see on the CodingChats readme that I flagged the repo as heavily AI-generated. Just like posts on the forum, I think flagging AI repos and readthedocs content is important.
Some repos look like they are the result of years of human effort but were really just dreamed up in an afternoon. That doesn’t necessarily make them worse than the multiyear human efforts, but I still think they should be flagged for the sake of transparency.
I was following a similar workflow but much more ad hoc than your slicer skill. One of the ways I got around the large repo size was to use symbolic links for e.g. Slicer which I had to refer to in many different projects but already had the source and build tree in another location and git submodules for dependencies that needed very specific versions and branches e.g. with fixes related to the current work a my project.
I also have some skills in my SlicerAdaptiveBrush repo which might be useful.
For example this one that I used to setup up the references to other software similar to your slicer skill:
And this one that I used to submit the extension to the extension index:
One of the nice things about skills is how flexible and interactive they are, i.e. they are just a guide for the LLM and can be discussed to do things slightly differently than what is originally defined in the skill. For example, when deciding whether to clone or symlink different reference projects and where they should be located, etc.
We are also planning to make some pretty major changes to the Talk2View Slicer extension so we can open source some of the components so it might be a good idea to discuss with anyone who is working on similar projects.
I realized that the project week github repo is also a great source of Slicer programming info, so I updated the skill to check that out too. It’s updated in the slicer-skill repo now.
This post was written with AI assistance.
Repository Integration
Added NA-MIC Project Week repository checkout to setup.sh
Updated SKILL.md to include it as a 4th resource for Slicer programming knowledge
Modified README.md to include the new search path
Successfully cloned the repository via setup.sh
Based on that I was able to get the following cool info.
This post was written with AI assistance.
Comprehensive Statistics Extraction
The extract_pw_stats.py script successfully extracted:
24 Project Weeks (PW44-PW21, covering 2015-2026)
2,291 Total Registered Participants
759 Total Projects
Average of 95.5 participants per week
Average of 39.9 projects per week
1,002 Unique participant names (from detailed data in 19 project weeks)
That is great @benzwick. I’ve been more focused on the developer side of things, but Talk2View and related projects should really help the user side too.
Since your extension repo is already cloned as part of the setup.sh, my slicer-skill should be able to find it, but it may not realize that it should. I’ll add something explicit to the skill file suggesting that it look at the md files in all the extensions for extra help when researching a topic.
As a follow-on to this, it would be great if extension developers could add SKILL.md file to their repositories to give extension-specific guidance on how to work with their codebases.
Just wanted to say thanks for this amazing skill. I’ve managed to build 2 Slicer extensions that I’ve previously wanted to build, but couldn’t due to my lack of experience in Slicer and the deeper nuances of the scanning technolog etc. I used your skill in claude code, explained what I wanted to do, and asked claude to come up with a plan. It did, and then implemented it. A few minor bugs, some I just debugged with it, others i told it to use the mcp server to look at, but all resolved. Overall, a great experience and a huge benefit to people who don’t work in Slicer or medical imaging dev every day.
This post was written with AI assistance.