Curated, reusable AI skills — instructional context, domain conventions, and callable agent tools for AI-assisted engineering.
Every AI assistant starts from zero — no accumulated engineering experience, no reusable workflows. This repo fixes that. It's a curated library of skills: bundles of domain knowledge, engineering patterns, and proven practices packaged for any Agent Skills-compatible client (Copilot, Claude, Cursor, and others). The knowledge here is not internal or proprietary — it reflects universal software engineering practices used at ABSA. Tomorrow the scope may expand to agents, MCP servers, and plugins as agentic tooling matures (see Scope).
Who is this for? Anyone who uses AI for AI-assisted engineering. The primary audience is technical: engineers, tech leads, architects, or anyone on a technical team.
- Scope
- How Skills Relate To Your Own
- Quickstart
- Skill Catalog
- Finding More Skills
- Contributing
- FAQ
- Troubleshooting
This repo currently focuses on Skills — basically just folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that an AI agent can load on demand to improve its performance on specialised tasks.
As our use of agentic tooling matures, the scope may expand to include:
- Agents — custom agent definitions for recurring engineering tasks (code review, architecture, research)
- MCP Servers — callable tool servers giving agents access to internal systems and data
- Plugins — bundled distributions packaging skills, agents, and MCP servers into a single install
If and when that happens, the repo structure, name, and install instructions will be updated accordingly. For now, skills are the right place to start — they are the lowest friction, highest value layer, and the foundation everything else builds on.
The skills in this repo are the base layer — shared conventions and capabilities applicable across teams and projects. You load them into your personal or project space and extend with your own layers, so every session inherits the team's collective knowledge or workflows.
If something might help the wider team, it belongs here.
Agentic Skills ← shared base (this repo)
└── Personal Skills ← your individual skills (~/.copilot/skills/ or ~/.agents/skills/)
└── Project Skills ← repository-specific (most commonly in .github/skills/)
Each layer extends the one above — personal and project layers are extensions, not replacements.
Skills are managed through the Vercel Skills CLI or via GitHub Copilot CLI slash commands.
# Install all skills globally
npx skills add https://github.com/AbsaOSS/agentic-toolkit -g
# Or install a single skill
npx skills add https://github.com/AbsaOSS/agentic-toolkit -g --skill pr-reviewFor the full guide — what skills are, how they activate, project-scoped installs, updates, Copilot CLI commands — see docs/getting-started.md.
Browse all available skills in the skills/ directory — each skill folder contains a SKILL.md with
its purpose, trigger phrases, and full instructions.
The catalog table will be populated as skills are added. See
skills/for the current set.
Before building a new skill, check whether one already exists:
| Source | What's Available |
|---|---|
| github/awesome-copilot | 200+ community skills: cloud, languages, security, DevOps, productivity |
| skills.sh | Open registry — install with npx skills add <owner/repo> |
| anthropics/skills | Anthropic reference skills including skill-creator |
| absa-group/agent-skills | Broader ABSA-owned skill collection |
| absa-group/cps-agentic-toolkit | CPS team's skill set built on top of this repo |
See CONTRIBUTING.md for the skill authoring guide — folder layout, frontmatter schema, writing effective descriptions and bodies, testing, and the PR checklist.
To propose a new skill — or to propose expanding the repo into agents, MCP servers, or plugins — open an issue.
Contributions are welcome from anyone.
A skill gives the agent instructions — prose it reads into context when a task matches. An agent is a full persona: a system prompt, tools, and behavioural constraints bundled together — it may use multiple skills. An MCP server gives the agent callable tools for live integrations and API calls. Think of skills as books, agents as the people who read them, and MCP servers as the phone lines they dial.
Yes. Skills follow the open Agent Skills standard and work with any compatible tool — Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, and custom pipelines.
Setup issues and common fixes are covered in docs/troubleshooting.md.