Agent skills for AI tools like Claude, Cursor, Copilot

Give your AI coding agents proven approaches to building better software. We’ve open sourced our agent skills to package thoughtbot practices for building, reviewing, testing, and maintaining software into reusable instructions that agents can put to work.

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What are agent skills?

Agent skills are reusable instructions and workflows that give AI agents specialized capabilities. Instead of repeatedly prompting an agent with the same context and process, a skill packages that expertise so the agent can apply it when it's needed.

For example, thoughtbot's Rails Audit Skill guides an agent through a comprehensive code audit based on thoughtbot practices, while Atomic Commits guides agents to make focused, incremental commits.

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Designed with care by experienced software development humans

We've spent more than 20 years refining practices for designing and building maintainable software. We're turning those practices into agent skills so developers can bring them into AI-assisted development workflows. We’re sharing them openly so the community can use, inspect, and improve them.

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Explore our agent skills

We've built a variety of skills across a few different agent plugins. Check out our Skills GitHub page or skills.sh/thoughtbot to explore and install these skills in your agent.

rails-development

Skills for Ruby on Rails development

react-development

React/Next.js development toolkit with performance review skills and MCP server integrations

design

Skills for product design work

rails-audit-thoughtbot

Rails audit skill from thoughtbot

atomic-commits

Guides agents to commit early and often in atomic increments, separate feature/refactor/cleanup work, and keep pull requests around ~200 lines

rails-consultant

A collection of skills for Rails development and consulting, with an emphasis on learning, communication, and client success

dependabot-review-skill-thoughtbot

A skill that reviews Dependabot gem upgrade pull requests to assess impact, breaking changes, and security vulnerabilities

clean-rspec-output

Systematically eliminates unexpected output from a Ruby on Rails RSpec test suite