Skills

About 471 wordsAbout 2 min

Skills introduces the standardized capability set CNB provides for NPCs (AI assistants).

When to use: when an NPC should call platform capabilities — for example letting an AI assistant view repositories, create issues, or query build status, or attaching these capabilities to your own NPC.

Overview

Skills is a standardized capability set provided by CNB for NPCs (AI assistants), built on top of OpenAPI(Open in new window). It enables NPCs to fully interact with the platform.

Capability List

The official Skills repository is cnb/skills, which includes the following core capabilities:

Code Hosting:

Repository management (view, create, search)
Issue operations (create, comment, close, label management)
PR operations (create, review, merge, status check)
Git operations (branch management, tags, releases)
Code review (automated review, inline comments)

Build & Deployment:

Pipeline configuration and triggering
Build log querying
Build status checking

Platform Interaction:

Organization and member management
User information querying
Artifact registry operations
Search and activities

For a more complete list of API capabilities, please refer to the OpenAPI documentation(Open in new window).

Usage Scenarios

Scenario 1: NPC Automatically Handles Issues

After a user @s an NPC in an Issue, the NPC automatically loads the corresponding Skill to complete the task:

@CodeBuddy Can you check if this Issue can be closed?

Scenario 2: NPC Automatically Reviews Code

After a user @s an NPC in a PR requesting code review:

@CodeBuddy Can you review this PR?

Installation & Configuration

Installing Skills

Install Skills in the NPC runtime image (relies on the cnb command provided by CNB CLI):

Dockerfile
FROM node:22-bookworm-slim

RUN apt-get update \
    && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends ca-certificates git git-lfs curl jq ripgrep \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* \
    && git lfs install \
    && npm install -g @cnbcool/cnb-cli skills \
    && npx skills add https://cnb.cool/cnb/skills/cnb-skill.git -g -y

Custom Skills

Create custom Skills in the project's .codebuddy/skills/ directory. Each Skill is a directory containing a SKILL.md file:

.codebuddy/skills/
  my-skill/
    SKILL.md    # Skill definition file describing capabilities and usage

The NPC automatically recognizes and loads custom Skills in the project.

Priority for Skills with the same name

Global-level Skills take priority and override project-level Skills with the same name. If a repo ships a stale copy of a Skill, the global version installed in the runtime image wins.

CNB CLI Plugin — The underlying command-line tool used by Skills, exposing the full OpenAPI via the cnb command
NPC — NPC concepts, event types, and configuration
NPC Configuration — How to define NPC roles in a repository
OpenAPI — Complete CNB platform API documentation