MCP Toolbox Agent Skills

This directory holds Agent Skills for the MCP Toolbox project — self-contained instructions that teach a coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Codex, and others) how to perform specific workflows against this repo.

Skills are grouped by audience:

maintainer/ — skills for maintaining the toolbox itself (e.g. triage-issues).

Installing

Skills install with npx skills (source), the open Agent Skills CLI. It works with any supported agent and needs only Node.js (no global install required).

By default it installs into the current project (.agents/skills/, symlinked into each detected agent's directory). Add -g to install globally into your home directory so the skill is available across all projects.

Install every skill

bash

# Interactive: pick which skills and agents to install
npx skills add googleapis/mcp-toolbox

# Non-interactive: install all skills for all detected agents
npx skills add googleapis/mcp-toolbox -y

Install all maintainer skills

Point at the category subdirectory:

bash

npx skills add googleapis/mcp-toolbox/skills/maintainer

Install a specific skill

Point directly at the skill's folder:

bash

# Shorthand
npx skills add googleapis/mcp-toolbox/skills/maintainer/triage-issues

# Or the full GitHub URL
npx skills add https://github.com/googleapis/mcp-toolbox/tree/main/skills/maintainer/triage-issues

From a source that contains several skills, you can also select by name instead of a subpath:

bash

npx skills add googleapis/mcp-toolbox --skill triage-issues   # one skill
npx skills add googleapis/mcp-toolbox --skill '*'             # all skills

Install globally

Any of the commands above take -g to install into your home directory instead of the current project:

bash

npx skills add googleapis/mcp-toolbox/skills/maintainer/triage-issues -g

Managing installed skills

bash

npx skills list                 # list installed skills
npx skills update               # update all installed skills to latest
npx skills update triage-issues # update a specific skill
npx skills remove triage-issues # remove a skill

update re-fetches only skills whose upstream content has changed and refreshes the whole skill folder (including bundled references/), so keep installed copies read-only — local edits are overwritten on update.