Agent Skills for AWS

This directory contains agent skills — curated packages of instructions and reference materials that help AI coding agents complete AWS tasks effectively. We plan to release new and updated skills on a regular cadence.

Using skills

There are three ways to get skills:

Install a plugin — If you installed a plugin (aws-core, aws-agents, or aws-data-analytics), the skills bundled with that plugin are already available to your agent.
Install locally — Copy skill directories from this repository to your agent's skills location, or use npx skills add aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws/skills.
Discover at runtime — Agents can search for and load skills on demand through the AWS MCP Server, without any local installation. Ask your agent: "Search for AWS skills related to databases."

To install skills locally, copy the skill directory to your agent's skills location:

Agent	Global skills path	Project skills path
Claude Code	`~/.claude/skills/`	`.claude/skills/`
Codex	`~/.codex/skills/`	`.agents/skills/`
Cursor	`~/.cursor/skills/`	`.cursor/skills/`
Kiro	`~/.kiro/skills/`	`.kiro/skills/`

Skill categories

Skills are organized into two categories: core and specialized.

Core skills

Core skills are bundled with the aws-core plugin and provide broad guidance across the most commonly used AWS services and development patterns. We recommend installing the aws-core plugin as your starting point if you're building and operating applications on AWS. It gives your agent foundational knowledge about service selection, architecture decisions, SDK usage, infrastructure-as-code, security, observability, and cost management.

Core skills cover:

AWS SDK usage patterns (Python, JavaScript, Swift)
Infrastructure as code (CDK, CloudFormation)
Compute (serverless, containers)
Security and identity (IAM)
Observability (CloudWatch, X-Ray, CloudTrail)
Application integration (messaging, streaming)
Cost management (Billing and Cost Management)
Full-stack applictaion development (AWS Blocks)
Generative AI (Bedrock)
Databases (service selection and routing)

Specialized skills

Specialized skills offer service-specific guidance and detailed workflows for common tasks that agents struggle with. These go deeper than core skills — providing step-by-step procedures for specific operations like creating a data lake table, launching an EC2 instance with best practices, or troubleshooting EFS connectivity.

Install specialized skills when you're working in a specific domain and want your agent to follow AWS-recommended procedures rather than improvising from general knowledge.

Specialized skills are organized by AWS service category: