Agent Skills

Agent skills are reusable instruction sets that guide AI agents through specialized Ansible development tasks. They follow the Agent Skills specification — each skill is a SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter and structured instructions.

Built-in skills

The Ansible DevTools project ships 13 built-in skills covering the core development workflows:

Skill	Category	Description
build-task	scaffold	Interactively create an Ansible task using a specific plugin
explain-plugin	domain	Explain a plugin with practical examples and parameter guidance
summarize-playbook	workflow	Comprehensive analysis of a playbook including structure and collection audit
summarize-collection	domain	Summarize a specific Ansible collection’s capabilities
summarize-collections	domain	Overview of all installed collections
overview-collection-sources	domain	Overview of configured collection sources (Galaxy, GitHub orgs)
summarize-galaxy-source	domain	Summarize collections available from Galaxy
summarize-github-source	domain	Summarize collections from a GitHub organization
summarize-execution-envs	domain	Overview of available execution environments
detail-execution-env	domain	Detailed information about a specific execution environment
overview-creator	scaffold	Overview of ansible-creator scaffolding capabilities
walkthrough-creator-command	scaffold	Guided walkthrough of a specific creator command
analyze-task-result	workflow	Analyze the result of a task execution

Installing skills

Via the plugin

If you install the Ansible DevTools Plugin, skills are included automatically and discoverable by the host.

Via npx skills (68+ agents)

The skills CLI installs skills to any supported coding agent:

# Install all Ansible skills to detected agents
npx skills add ansible/vscode-ansible

# List available skills first
npx skills add ansible/vscode-ansible --list

# Install specific skills
npx skills add ansible/vscode-ansible --skill build-task --skill explain-plugin

# Install to specific agents
npx skills add ansible/vscode-ansible -a cursor -a claude-code

# Install globally (available across all projects)
npx skills add ansible/vscode-ansible -g

This works with Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Windsurf, Zed, Neovim (Neovate), Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, and 60+ more agents.

Via the MCP server

The MCP server exposes skills programmatically through four tools:

• skill_search — search skills by keyword
• skill_list — list all available skills with metadata
• skill_get — retrieve full skill content by ID
• skill_list_sources — list configured skill sources

Skill format

Each skill is a directory containing a SKILL.md file:

skills/build-task/
└── SKILL.md

The file uses YAML frontmatter for metadata and markdown for instructions:

---
name: Build Ansible Task
description: Interactively create an Ansible task using a specific plugin
tags: [tasks, plugins, generation]
category: scaffold
triggers: [build task, create task, new task, task builder]
---

# Build Ansible Task

Instructions for the agent...

Frontmatter fields

Field	Required	Description
name	Yes	Human-readable skill name
description	Yes	Brief explanation of what the skill does
tags	Recommended	Discovery and categorization tags
category	Recommended	One of: scaffold, domain, workflow
triggers	Recommended	Phrases that should activate this skill

Three-level progressive disclosure

Skills support three levels of context loading (per ADR-018):

1. Level 1 — Frontmatter: Name + description always in context (for discovery)
2. Level 2 — Body: Full SKILL.md loaded when the agent decides to apply the skill
3. Level 3 — References: Additional files loaded on demand during the workflow

Custom skill sources

The MCP server loads skills from multiple sources configured via the ANSIBLE_SKILL_SOURCES environment variable:

[
  { "type": "builtin" },
  { "type": "local", "path": "/path/to/custom/skills" },
  { "type": "github", "repo": "ansible-community/ai-forge" }
]

This enables teams to maintain organization-specific skills alongside the built-in set.