Why One Skill Refuses to Be Redistributed (and Why That's the Right Call)

aitutors.me's public plugin repo ships exactly two skills side by side: flashcards, MIT licensed, free to read and adapt; and Heddy IP, proprietary, explicitly marked "do not redistribute." Same author, same repo, same day of shipping — and a deliberately different licence on each. That contrast is more interesting than either skill alone, because it's a clean, real-world answer to a question every builder shipping skills eventually has to make: what actually belongs in the open part of your product, and what doesn't?

The test that seems to be doing the work

Look at what each skill actually contains. The flashcards skill is a format and quality-control spec — a description of what makes a well-formed spaced-repetition card, encoded as rules an agent can follow. It holds no account state, calls no API, and carries no curriculum content. Its own description says as much explicitly: it's format and QA only, and if asked to actually tutor, it should say so and stop.

Heddy IP, by contrast, is the brand asset itself, operationalised. It's not a technique for generating consistent brand art in the abstract — it's the specific reference sheets, the specific character features, the specific governance rules that make images of this owl, not an owl. Give a competitor the flashcards skill and they get a good flashcard format; they don't get anything of aitutors.me's. Give a competitor Heddy IP's reference assets and prompt templates and they could, in principle, generate their own Heddy content — which is exactly the brand-dilution risk that licence exists to prevent.

The dividing line isn't "is this useful" — both skills are useful. It's "is this a technique, or is this the asset." A technique generalises without cost to the original; an asset doesn't. That's a cleaner and more portable heuristic than "open source everything" or "keep everything proprietary," and it's worth applying to your own skill catalogue if you're building one.

What gets lost if you get this backwards

Open-sourcing the wrong half is a real, common mistake, not a hypothetical. Open-source a brand asset and you've handed away the thing that made investing in the brand worthwhile — every derivative built on your reference sheets and prompt templates competes with the original for the same visual identity, at zero cost to whoever copied it. Keep a technique proprietary that didn't need to be and you lose the compounding benefit of other builders extending it, citing it, and pointing traffic and credibility back at the source — which is exactly what's happening in this piece, and the ten others in this series, about the flashcards skill specifically.

The trust dividend of getting it right

There's a second-order effect worth naming: licensing the technique openly and the asset tightly is itself a trust signal. A marketplace or a parent evaluating this product can see, from the licence file alone, that the team drew a real line rather than defaulting to "everything proprietary" out of caution or "everything open" out of a growth-hacking instinct. That's a small thing, but it's the kind of small, checkable thing that separates a team that's thought carefully about its IP from one that hasn't.

A framework worth stealing

Before licensing your next skill, ask the same question this repo's structure implicitly answers: if a direct competitor got unrestricted access to this exact file, would they gain something specific to your product, or would they gain a generally useful capability that doesn't advantage them over you specifically? The first case is an asset — keep it close. The second is a technique — there's a real argument for shipping it MIT, the way aitutors.me did with its flashcards format, and letting the goodwill and citations compound instead.

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