lark-markdown: The 685K-Install Skill for Raw .md in Lark

Lark Drive stores a plain .md file as a file, and that is exactly what most agent tools refuse to leave alone — they convert it into a docx document the moment you touch it. The lark-markdown skill (v1.2.2, MIT, shipped inside the official larksuite/cli repo, 17.4K stars) takes the opposite route: it fetches, creates, overwrites, patches, and diffs the raw Markdown, format unchanged. I read its 70-line SKILL.md end to end and scraped skills.sh on 2026-09-22 — 684,911 all-time installs, rank 38, weekly band [37,191, 33,693, 31,059, 27,356, 27,720, 27,082, 25,322, 25,844] drifting down from the 37K peak.

Five Shortcuts, and They Only Touch .md Files

Every operation hangs off lark-cli markdown +<verb>. +fetch pulls a file’s content, +create uploads a new .md into Drive or a Wiki node, +overwrite replaces an existing file wholesale. +patch edits a chunk in place, and +diff compares two remote versions or a remote file against a local draft. Nothing here renders, converts, or previews — the skill treats Markdown as text with a .md suffix and stops there.

Identity rules come first in the SKILL.md, not the commands. Markdown files usually sit in a user’s cloud space, so the skill defaults to --as user and expects lark-cli auth login to have run; --as bot only fits automation where the app created the file and holds its ACL. When a create or overwrite fails, the skill says to judge the error before flipping identity: bots mostly hit app-scope or folder-ACL gaps, users mostly hit missing grants — blind toggling between the two just burns retries.

Two small details bite copy-pasters. --name and a local --file must carry an explicit .md suffix, or the shortcut errors out. And --content takes a raw string, @file to read a local file, or - for stdin, so piping a draft in is the idiomatic move.

The Patch Illusion: Download, Replace, Re-Upload

+patch looks like a server-side partial update, and it is not. The skill’s own wording is blunt: the shortcut fully downloads the Markdown, performs the text replacement locally, then overwrites the whole file upstream. That ordering decides what you can and can’t do with it.

Only one --pattern / --content pair runs per call, so multi-spot edits need repeated invocations. The final content must be non-empty — Drive rejects zero-byte Markdown, and the CLI treats an empty result as a mistyped pattern. Regex replacement trips people on escaping, since --pattern is parsed as a regex: "version (1.0)" matches the parenthesized group as a capture, not a literal string. The skill’s example spells the fix out — "version \\(1\\.0\\)" for parens and dots — which reads like a lesson paid for in failed patches.

What It Refuses to Do (and Who Does It)

The boundary list is half the file, and it maps each rejection to a sibling skill. Turning a local .md into a new online docx document goes to lark-drive’s +import --type docx. Rename, move, delete, search, permissions, and comments all leave this skill too, to lark-drive. Version history is a prerequisite, not a feature: grab version numbers with lark-cli drive +version-history first, then come back for diff, download, or rollback.

Retry discipline is equally strict. missing scope, permission denied, not found, quota_exceeded, and version limit stop the run immediately — the agent follows the error’s own hint. Only rate_limit, server_error, or transient network failures earn a bounded backoff retry. Target tokens follow the same no-guessing rule: Drive folders take --folder-token, Wiki nodes take --wiki-token, and a paste-able URL works because the CLI normalizes it — but a doc, sheet, or wiki URL dropped into --folder-token is a guaranteed miss.

The one-line map: lark-markdown edits .md files as files; lark-drive manages Drive objects — import, move, versions, ACLs; lark-doc and lark-wiki operate Lark’s docx-style documents and wiki trees. Each keeps its own SKILL.md in the same repo, and none overlaps another.

One caution from the leaderboard: 684,911 installs is a pack number, not a lark-markdown number. The whole open.feishu.cn family locks step — lark-vc-agent at 662,804, lark-apps at 629,466, lark-note at 502,652, all within a couple thousand installs of each other per week — the same counter signature we’ve seen across the azure-skills pack. The skill itself is a thin, sharp router onto the lark-cli extension, which is exactly what a skill on a 200-command CLI should be.

If your workflows live on plain Markdown files in Lark, install it with npx skills add https://github.com/larksuite/cli --skill lark-markdown, then read the sibling SKILL.md for lark-doc to see where document import takes over. The edge cases are documented; the .md suffix rule is not negotiable.