Skip to content
Taskless

What Are Agent Skills?

Agent skills are a way to extend AI coding agents with new capabilities. Taskless uses the Agent Skills specification so your rules are applied automatically during AI-assisted development.

Taskless ships as a single consolidated skill. Once it’s installed, your coding agent can:

  • Create rules from natural language descriptions, locally without an account or via the Taskless API when authenticated
  • Improve rules by iterating on existing rules to fix false positives or broaden coverage
  • Check your code against rules in .taskless/rules/ before suggesting changes
  • Avoid flagged patterns by referencing your rules during code generation
  • Walk through a guided onboarding pass via /tskl onboard to discover rule candidates from your codebase

The result is that issues get caught during code generation, not in code review.

For Humans and For Agents

Section titled “For Humans and For Agents”

The Taskless CLI splits its audience:

  • For humans: run npx @taskless/cli (no args) to install or update Taskless in this repository. Run npx @taskless/cli init directly for the first install.
  • For agents: the installed skill is a thin router. When the agent needs to act on a Taskless task, it fetches the current recipe by running npx @taskless/cli help <topic> and follows it.

Recipe content lives in the CLI, not the skill body. Whichever CLI version your agent runs is the version of the recipe it gets.

Slash Commands

Section titled “Slash Commands”

The consolidated skill registers a single /tskl command (in tools that support slash commands, like Claude Code and Cursor). The command routes by topic: /tskl onboard, /tskl rule create, /tskl check, and so on.

Installing Skills

Section titled “Installing Skills”

The Taskless CLI auto-detects supported tool directories in your repository (.claude/, .cursor/, .opencode/, .agents/) and installs the skill into each one. Run:

Terminal window
npx @taskless/cli init

For agents whose tool directories aren’t auto-detected, any installer that follows the Agent Skills specification can install Taskless directly from the GitHub repository:

How It Works

Section titled “How It Works”
  1. You install the skill via npx @taskless/cli init. Canonical content lives at .taskless/skills/taskless/SKILL.md; each tool directory gets a thin reference stub that delegates to it.
  2. When your agent starts a session, it discovers the installed skill via the tool’s normal skill-discovery mechanism.
  3. The agent picks up your rules from .taskless/rules/ and uses them as guidelines during code generation.
  4. When the user asks for a Taskless action, the agent runs npx @taskless/cli help <topic> to fetch the current recipe, then executes it.

For details on the install layout and per-tool support, see Installing Skills.