Skill

The Appstrate Agent Skill is the third way to drive Appstrate, alongside the webapp and the CLI. You install it once into your coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Antigravity, any AGENTS.md-aware host) and from then on the agent knows how to author manifests, package AFPS, deploy, run, iterate, wire providers, rotate keys, switch profiles, and call appstrate api without you having to copy-paste recipes from the docs.

The skill is open source (Apache 2.0) at github.com/appstrate/skills. It is framework-agnostic: the same SKILL.md + references run under every host that supports the Anthropic Agent Skills format.

Install

One command, auto-detects your coding agent:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/appstrate/skills/main/install.sh | bash -s appstrate

Inspect install.sh before piping to bash if you want. The installer copies the skill to the canonical path for the host it detects. Force a specific target with a flag:

What the skill contains

skills/appstrate/
├── SKILL.md              # Entry point, loaded on trigger
├── assets/               # Starter manifests (agent, skill, tool)
├── references/
│   ├── create-agent.md   # Full 5-step workflow
│   ├── concepts.md       # Platform overview + pointers
│   ├── manifest-schema.md
│   ├── prompt-writing.md
│   ├── system-tools.md   # output, state, report, log, add-memory
│   ├── api-cheatsheet.md # appstrate api flags + skill-specific gotchas
│   ├── inline-runs.md
│   ├── profiles.md       # Multi-instance workflow
│   └── setup.md          # Install edge cases
└── scripts/
    └── afps-pack.sh      # Pack a directory as .afps (ZIP)

The skill does NOT run appstrate install for you, by design. Install is a human decision (tier, Docker-or-not, port), so the skill assumes appstrate whoami already succeeds and walks you through the manual install from the Quickstart when it doesn't.

Use it

In a new chat with your coding agent, name the skill explicitly so it loads first:

Using the Appstrate skill, build me a Gmail digest agent that summarises unread mail every morning.

Naming the skill is the single most reliable activation signal. Once loaded, typical prompts:

• "Create an agent called email-triage that reads my Gmail inbox and posts a summary to Slack. Wire the Gmail and Slack providers for end-user eu_alice."
• "Pack my local ./my-skill folder as an AFPS and publish it to my instance under @acme/[email protected]."
• "Rotate the API key named ci-deploy. Revoke the old one only after the new one is verified."
• "Diff my dev profile's agent list with prod, tell me what's missing on prod."
• "Replay run run_01HZABC against end-user eu_bob to check if the provider keys work for him too."
• "List every agent that's failing more than 10% of the time this week, show me the last run's stderr."

The agent reads the relevant reference file on demand (progressive disclosure: only create-agent.md for authoring, only inline-runs.md for one-shot runs, etc.) so the context window stays small. If something fails, it stops and surfaces the error instead of retrying blindly.

Update

Same command with --update:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/appstrate/skills/main/install.sh | bash -s appstrate --update

Re-run whenever the CLI version on the instance moves past the skill's documented commands. The skill itself has a self-update hint baked into its error table, so your agent will surface the suggestion when it hits a flag it doesn't recognise.

Uninstall

Delete the directory that matches your host target from the table above. No residual config, no registry entry, no cleanup needed.

Customise it for your org

The skill is just Markdown + scripts in a git repo, so an internal platform team can:

• Fork appstrate/skills, add org-specific conventions (naming rules, required provider scopes, approval workflow) to SKILL.md or a new reference, and pipe your forked install.sh instead.
• Ship a second skill that wraps Appstrate with your own domain vocabulary (e.g. an acme-agents skill that enforces your naming scheme and pre-selects prod-acme as the default profile).
• Publish either as a private repo; coding agents load from any URL, not just GitHub.

See Skill Creator for the format and Compare for where the Appstrate + coding-agent combo fits against agent frameworks that ship as SDKs.

Reference

• Quickstart: the 5-step onboarding that ends with loading this skill.
• CLI: the 9 commands the skill drives under the hood.
• Webapp: the visual counterpart when you prefer clicks to prompts.
• Coding Agents integration: use cases and why this combo beats coding-agent alone.
• github.com/appstrate/skills: source, issues, and the full skill catalog (not only appstrate; future skills for providers, tenants, etc. ship here).