Skills

On this page 4

Stacks ships 115 agent skills. Each one is a SKILL.md that documents part of the framework, or part of the craft of working in it, authoritatively enough that an agent reads it instead of guessing at an API.

They are not a chat feature. They are files in your repository, under storage/framework/defaults/ai/skills, and buddy setup:ai links them into whatever directory your agent reads. Claude Code, OpenAI Codex CLI, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and Gemini CLI all work.

buddy setup:ai claude

See Using skills for the rest of that story, and Writing your own when you want to add one.

Two kinds

Subsystem reference is most of the set: one skill per part of the framework, model-invoked, so your agent reaches for it on its own when the task matches. You rarely name one. When someone asks the agent to add a model, it reads ORM and Models before writing defineModel(), and the model it writes uses the traits rather than reimplementing them.

Engineering craft is the smaller set that shapes how the work happens rather than which subsystem it touches: how to plan a change, where to put a seam, how to debug without guessing, how to review a diff on two axes, when to hand a session off. Flow is the router over them, and Flows walks the routes they form.

Sections

Section	What is in it
Engineering craft	How the work happens: planning, building, debugging, reviewing, handing off. 18 skills.
Data layer	Models, the ORM, queries, migrations, seeding and search. 7 skills.
Backend and API	Routes, actions, auth, jobs, events, caching and storage. 23 skills.
Messaging	Email, SMS, push, chat, notifications and calendars. 7 skills.
Frontend	stx templates, Crosswind, composables, desktop and mobile. 7 skills.
Design	Premium UI work, aesthetic presets, image-first pipelines and diagrams. 12 skills.
Domain packages	Commerce, payments, CMS, dashboard and i18n. 5 skills.
Toolchain	The buddy CLI, building, serving, deploying, testing and linting. 20 skills.
Platform	Config, env, dependencies, auto-imports, paths and types. 9 skills.
Utilities	Strings, arrays, collections, objects, dates and slugs. 7 skills.

Why they are files

Three things follow from a skill being a file in the repo rather than a setting somewhere.

They version with the framework. Upgrade Stacks and the skills describing it upgrade too, because buddy setup:ai symlinks them by default. A skill cannot document an API that shipped two releases ago unless the code did as well.

They are yours to override. app/Skills/<name>/SKILL.md shadows a bundled skill of the same name, exactly like app/Actions/ shadows a default action. If your project does authentication differently, say so once and every agent working in the repo reads your version.

They are reviewable. A skill lands in a pull request like anything else. The one file that is committed by default is AGENTS.md, because it is shared guidance the whole team sees; the generated per-agent directories are gitignored, since which agent you use is a personal choice.

Credit

Several of the engineering craft skills are adapted from mattpocock/skills, MIT licensed, with credit in each SKILL.md. The originals are worth reading on their own.