A 2k-Star Agent Skill for Studying Ni Haisha's TCM Courses

Ni Haisha's recorded TCM courses span dozens of modules — Shang Han Lun, Jingui Yaolue, acupuncture, materia medica — scattered across hours of lectures, board screenshots, and transcripts. JuneYaooo/nihaisha-nishi-tcm, a 2k-star Agent Skill, distills that corpus into something your agent can search: ask in plain language, get study-oriented answers with screenshots and page-level citations attached.

Why This Skill Matters

A regular RAG dump answers questions but cannot show its work. This skill is built around traceability: 2,986 screenshot evidence entries (649 for the Shang Han Lun module alone, 656 for Jingui Yaolue) indexed by formula name, acupoint, lesson, pathomechanism, or timestamp, plus page-level PDF evidence you can cite as pdf-evidence:<doc_id>#p<page>. The 240-question evaluation the repo publishes — each question independently generated and blind-judged across three runs — scores the standard skill at 91.4% on answer quality.

Equally important is what it refuses to do. The safety boundary is explicit: course study and TCM theory organization only — no personal diagnosis, prescriptions, or dosage guidance. The 2026-07-15 update even moved executable instructions (dosage, decoction, needling, bloodletting, toxic-herb handling) out of the distilled text layer and back into the evidence layer, where they stay explicitly marked as not instructions to follow.

Installation

Paste this prompt into your AI assistant:

Please install the nihaisha skill for me:
https://github.com/JuneYaooo/nihaisha-nishi-tcm

The agent clones the repository and installs the directory into its skills folder. Restart the agent afterward so the skill metadata reloads. The default mode is lightweight — it reads the bundled references/, assets/, and search scripts, with no extra dependencies or model downloads.

One availability note: the repo's Chinese README update log (2026-08-08) states that the optional RAG + knowledge-graph mode is temporarily offline while known problems are fixed — it is not installable and no data package is offered right now. The lightweight mode's course Q&A, formula comparisons, lesson review, screenshot search, and PDF traceback are unaffected.

Real Workflow: Compare Formula Decision Points

A classic Shang Han Lun task is telling near-identical formulas apart. Give the agent this prompt:

Use nihaisha to compare the formula-pattern decision points for Guizhi Tang, Mahuang Tang, and Gegen Tang.

Expect the study-oriented output the README documents: the symptom clusters that separate each formula, the pathomechanism layers behind them, related contraindication reminders — each claim anchored to course material rather than the model's memory of it.

Real Workflow: Pull Board-Screenshot Evidence

When you want to see what Ni actually wrote on the board:

Use nihaisha to find board-screenshot evidence related to Xiao Chaihu Tang.

The screenshot index prefers paths under assets/screenshots/..., pulled from the lessons where the formula appears. The plain-language entry works the same way — ask why some people catch a cold with chills and no sweat while others fear wind and sweat, and the skill maps the everyday wording into the taiyang wind-strike versus cold-damage distinction the courses teach.

Tips

• Coverage is module-by-module: 11 of the 13 course modules carry screenshot evidence, including Tianji (527 images) and acupuncture (501); the Liang Dong interview and Stanford lecture are text-only modules.
• Recommended books get a separately labeled search layer — results are presented as supplemental, never mixed into Ni's own material.
• Treat it as a study index, not a reference oracle: the project banner notes it still has known issues and is under active iteration, so update your installed copy periodically.
• The author built this for their father's study and open-sourced it — the README's origin story is worth a read for how course distillation gets scoped.

When Not to Use This

This skill studies a course corpus; it does not practice medicine. Real symptoms need a qualified clinician, and the README says so in its safety notice — for Fuzi-class herbs, urgent-purging formulas, pregnancy, children, or any emergency, consult a physician or emergency service immediately. If you want TCM study without an agent at all, the README also points to the NotebookLM route Ni's student recommends: upload course PDFs yourself and query them there.

See the leaderboard for more skills.