Skip to main content

Agent skills

SweetPad ships a set of agent skills: short instruction files that teach an AI coding agent how to drive the sweetpad CLI on your behalf. With them installed, your agent already knows to build with the right destination, read diagnostics from a failed build without rebuilding, and inspect resolved build settings, instead of you spelling out the commands every session.

The skills are vendor-neutral. The same files install into any agent that reads the open skills format (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, Gemini, and others) through one installer. There is no Claude-specific step.

tip

This page is for people who develop with an AI coding agent. If you drive SweetPad by hand from the sidebar or the terminal, you can skip it.

What a skill is

A skill is a small markdown file with a one-line description of what it's for. Your agent reads those descriptions up front, and when a request matches one, it loads the fuller instructions on demand. So the skills cost almost nothing until they're relevant, then they hand the agent a tested recipe rather than a guess.

SweetPad's skills wrap the CLI's machine-readable surface, the -o json envelope and the specifier-based destination selection, so the agent reads structured output instead of scraping human text.

Prerequisites

The skills teach an agent to run sweetpad, so the CLI has to be installed and on your PATH first:

brew install sweetpad-dev/tap/sweetpad

See Get started with the CLI if you haven't set it up yet. You also need an AI coding agent that supports the open skills format.

Install

Install every SweetPad skill into the agents on your machine with one command:

npx skills add sweetpad-dev/sweetpad

This uses the open skills installer. It fetches SweetPad's skills straight from the repository, detects the agents you have, and writes the skills into each one's own format.

To take every skill without the interactive picker, add --skill '*' --yes:

npx -y skills add sweetpad-dev/sweetpad --skill '*' --yes

Target a single agent

Pass --agent to install into just one tool, for example Claude Code:

npx skills add sweetpad-dev/sweetpad --agent claude-code

Leave --agent off to install into every supported agent the installer finds.

Using the skills

Once installed, your agent selects a skill on its own when your request matches one. Asking it to "build and run this on the booted simulator", "figure out why the build failed", or "show the resolved build settings" is enough to trigger the matching skill. Most agents also let you invoke a skill by name from their own slash-command menu; check your agent's documentation for how it lists them.

Keeping them updated

The skills don't update themselves the way a Homebrew formula does. Re-run the install command to pull the latest versions:

npx skills add sweetpad-dev/sweetpad

Running it again overwrites the installed copies with the current ones from the repository.