Prompt users to upgrade flutter skills when they are out of date

[kenzieschmoll]

Flutter's officially supported IDEs (VS Code & IntelliJ / Android Studio) should prompt users to upgrade their skills when they are stale. This is similar to how the IDE prompts users to run flutter pub get when their dependencies have changed or how the IDE notifies users that a new flutter release is available.

This should be possible since the skills have a last modified field and the IDE can fetch information about the most up to date skills to compare the dates. Additional information is needed from @jwren or @johnpryan about how the IDEs should lookup the most up to date skills version.

CC @jwren @johnpryan @mariamhas

[johnpryan]

Right now, users can run npx skills check to check for updates and and npx skills update to update the skills. Could we add a feature to Flutter DevTools to do this automatically?

[kenzieschmoll]

Could we add a feature to Flutter DevTools to do this automatically?

I don't think DevTools is the right place to do this since DevTools is not really involved in the process of writing code / editing project files. The IDE is probably the right place to prompt the user. WRT to doing this automatically, that may be a bit invasive since users may have local modifications on some of their skills that they do not want to lose.

[johnpryan]

Maybe we should add a feature to the VSCode plugin to prompt the user then? Trying to imagine how this could work.

[DanTup]

Maybe we should add a feature to the VSCode plugin to prompt the user then?

IMO we should try to put it somewhere we can share between editors if possible. For example we can prompt users from the analysis server (for example we do this the unified-analytics driven surveys) and that wouldn't involve any per-IDE work/duplication.

I don't know enough about these yet to know if the analysis server is the most appropriate place (cc @bwilkerson), but it is one option..DTD, the MCP server and Flutter daemon could be other candidates (I'm not sure any of them have existing support for prompts, but there's no reason we couldn't extend them if they seem like the right place).

[kenzieschmoll]

Analysis server seems like it could be a good option. Especially since it could easily perform the detection of whether the user has flutter skills installed in their current project and check the date. After comparing to the latest skills version available, it could decide whether to send the prompt instruction to the IDE.

[bwilkerson]

Wherever we implement this support (and I agree that the analysis server is one reasonable choice), we'll probably want to have a file somewhere to record when we last prompted the user so that we don't end up over prompting. Just part of the design of exactly how we want this to work.

[johnpryan]

Is this something that https://pub.dev/packages/skills could support?

cc: @jakemac53

[jakemac53]

package:skills can definitely support a command for checking for updates yes, it keeps metadata about the skills it has installed and that can be extended if needed

[jakemac53]

The MCP server is not a good candidate because support for elicitation (prompting) is very fragmented and unreliable.

[johnpryan]

Okay, I'll file an issue to recommend package:skills in our instructions, when we deem that it's ready to recommend to users.