By the end of this guide you will have run skills and added your first skill to your agent.

skills is a .NET CLI that installs, updates, and authors Agent Skills, the portable SKILL.md files that extend AI coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. You point it at a source (a GitHub repo, a git URL, or a local folder), and it places the skill where your agent looks for it. Your agent then loads the skill on demand when a task matches it.

This page takes you from zero to one working skill. It takes about five minutes.

Prerequisites

Before you start, make sure you have the following:

These docs run skills with dnx, so there is nothing to install first. If you would rather have skills on your PATH, install the global tool instead (it needs only the .NET SDK 8.0 or newer). See Install as a global tool.

Run skills

These docs run skills with dnx, which needs no install. You can also install it as a global tool if you prefer skills on your PATH.

Run with dnx

dnx ships with the .NET 10 SDK and runs a tool straight from NuGet, the way npx runs a package from npm. Nothing is installed up front.

dnx skills add anthropics/skills --agent claude-code

On the first run, dnx prompts you to confirm the package download before it proceeds:

Tool package skills@<version> will be downloaded from source https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json.
Proceed? [y/n] (y):

After you confirm, the install proceeds and prints the summary shown in Add your first skill. The first run downloads the package into your NuGet cache; later runs reuse it and start immediately. dnx skills is shorthand for dotnet tool exec skills.

To skip the download prompt (for example in CI), pass --yes:

dnx --yes skills add anthropics/skills --agent claude-code

You can control the skills version that dnx runs and where it fetches it from:

If your repository has a .config/dotnet-tools.json manifest that lists skills, dnx honors the pinned version from the manifest, which keeps one-shot runs consistent with the version your team committed.

Install as a global tool

If you would rather have skills on your PATH, install it as a global .NET tool. This needs the .NET SDK 8.0 or newer.

dotnet tool install -g skills

You can invoke the tool using the following command: skills
Tool 'skills' (version '0.3.0') was successfully installed.

With the global tool you run skills directly: drop the dnx prefix from every example in these docs (dnx skills add ... becomes skills add ...). Confirm the install with skills --version, which prints a value like 0.3.0+<git-sha> (the trailing suffix records the exact commit the build came from).

To pin skills to a version your whole team shares, install it as a local tool through a manifest instead. From the repository root:

dotnet new tool-manifest
dotnet tool install skills

Local tools are restored with dotnet tool restore and run through dotnet skills. Check the manifest (./.config/dotnet-tools.json) into source control so every collaborator uses the same version.

Add your first skill

You are ready to install a skill. The example below installs skills from anthropics/skills, Anthropic's reference repository, targeting Claude Code.

dnx skills add anthropics/skills --agent claude-code

Agent names are case-sensitive. Use claude-code, not claude or Claude. For GitHub Copilot the name is github-copilot.

The skills CLI fetches the source, discovers the skills, installs them, and prints a summary:

Source: https://github.com/anthropics/skills.git
Found 2 skill(s)

┌─Installation Summary─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Canonical: /your-project/.agents/skills                                      │
│ Symlinked:  Claude Code                                                      │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
┌─Installed 2 skill(s)─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ ✓ pdf                                                                        │
│   → /your-project/.claude/skills/pdf                                         │
│ ✓ docx                                                                       │
│   → /your-project/.claude/skills/docx                                        │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Done!  Review skills before use; they run with full agent permissions.

The trailing line is a deliberate safety nudge. A skill can include scripts that the agent runs with your agent's full permissions. Install skills only from sources you trust, and read a new skill before you use it.

If you omit --agent, the CLI runs interactively and lets you pick which agents to target from the ones it detects on your machine. To install only specific skills from a multi-skill source, add --skill <name> (repeatable). For the full set of source forms, scopes, and flags, see Installing Skills.

Checkpoint. If everything worked, you should see the Installed 2 skill(s) panel and the Done! line, with no error. If you saw an Invalid agents panel, you misspelled the agent name (it is case-sensitive). If you saw No valid skills found, the source had no SKILL.md with both a name and a description. See Troubleshooting for more.

See what is installed

To confirm what landed in your project, list the installed skills:

dnx skills list

Project Skills

Skill  Path                   Agents
pdf    ./.claude/skills/pdf   Claude Code
docx   ./.claude/skills/docx  Claude Code

The table shows each skill's name, where it lives on disk, and the agents linked to it (shown by their display name, Claude Code). To list global skills instead, add -g. For machine-readable output, add --json.

Use the skill

The skill now lives where your agent looks for it. You do not need to do anything else.

Your agent loads each installed skill's name and description at startup, then reads the full skill only when a task matches the description. This is progressive disclosure: the description is the trigger, and the body loads on demand. Start a task that matches the skill, and your agent picks it up automatically.

Update or remove the global tool

If you run skills with dnx, you never update it yourself: each run fetches the version you ask for. The commands below apply when you installed the global tool.

To update the global skills tool to the latest version:

dotnet tool update -g skills

Tool 'skills' was successfully updated from version '0.3.0' to version '<new>'.

To uninstall it:

dotnet tool uninstall -g skills

Tool 'skills' (version '0.3.0') was successfully uninstalled.

Note that dotnet tool update updates the skills CLI, not your installed skills. To check your skills for updates, use the dnx skills update command, covered in Installing Skills.

Next steps

• Installing Skills: every source form, project versus global scope, picking agents and skills, symlink versus copy, and checking for skill updates.
• Authoring Skills: scaffold a SKILL.md with dnx skills init, write a good description, and publish your skill.
• Reference: the complete command and flag surface.