Posit Agent Skills

What it is – A curated collection of Agent Skills – reusable, language‑model‑agnostic plug‑ins that extend coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, Posit Assistant, etc.) with domain‑specific knowledge and workflows. Each skill is a small, self‑contained set of prompts, templates and helper scripts that the assistant can invoke automatically when you work on a relevant task.

Core idea

Agent Skills is an open specification (see https://agentskills.io) for describing how a coding‑assistant should perform a particular piece of work (e.g., create a GitHub PR, write a release blog post, style a Shiny app).
Posit Dev provides a public repository of ready‑made skills covering common developer activities, especially for the R ecosystem and for general software engineering.
When a skill is installed, the assistant detects the context (file type, project layout, user request) and runs the skill without the user having to type a special command.

What’s inside?

Category	Example skills	What they do
posit‑dev	`critical-code-reviewer`, `describe-design`, `new-work`	General developer helpers – adversarial code reviews, automatic architecture docs, session‑wide todo tracking.
github	`pr-create`, `pr-threads-address`, `pr-threads-resolve`	Automate pull‑request creation, monitor CI, and bulk‑resolve review threads.
open‑source	`create-release-checklist`, `release-post`	Build release checklists and ready‑to‑publish blog posts for R/Python packages.
r‑lib	`r-tidyverse-style`, `r-testthat`, `r-cran-extrachecks`, …	R‑package‑centric helpers – style enforcement, test best‑practices, CRAN pre‑flight checks, lifecycle management, async computing with mirai, etc.
ggsql	`ggsql`	Write “grammar‑of‑graphics‑style” SQL queries, useful for data‑visualisation pipelines.
shiny	`shiny-bslib`, `shiny-bslib-theming`, `brand-yml`	Modern UI building, theming and branding for Shiny apps (both R and Python).
quarto	`authoring`, `brand-yml`, `alt-text`	Authoring guidance, branding, and accessibility alt‑text generation for Quarto documents.
connect	`deploy-to-connect`	Deploy R or Python content to a Posit Connect server.

Each skill lives in its own folder with a README that explains the prompts, any required templates, and how the assistant should surface the functionality.

Installing the skills

The repo follows the Agent Skills CLI (npx skills add).
Typical workflows:

# List everything without installing
npx skills add posit-dev/skills --list

# Install every skill interactively
npx skills add posit-dev/skills --all

# Install only a couple of skills (e.g., from the r‑lib category)
npx skills add posit-dev/skills --skill r-tidyverse-style --skill r-testthat

You can target a specific assistant:

--agent posit-assistant – copies the skills into the Posit Assistant directory (~/.posit/assistant/skills/).
--agent claude-code – installs into Claude Code’s skill folder.
Omit --agent to install into the generic ~/.agents/skills/ location, which works for any harness that follows the spec.

For Claude Code there are three supported methods (marketplace add, direct install, or manual copy) – all ultimately just copy the skill directories into the agent’s skill path.

How you use them

Once installed, the assistant watches your prompts and the files you edit. When it detects a relevant situation (e.g., you ask “Help me write a release post for dplyr 1.2.0” or you open a PR with failing CI), it automatically activates the matching skill and guides you through the steps. No extra command line work is required after installation.

Who should care?

Developers who use AI coding assistants and want reliable, reproducible helpers for routine tasks (code review, PR handling, package release, etc.).
Data‑science teams that rely on the Posit stack (R, Shiny, Quarto, Connect) and want their assistants to understand domain‑specific conventions.
Team leads / DevOps looking to standardise CI/PR workflows across the organization via AI.
Contributors interested in extending the Agent Skills ecosystem – the repo includes contribution guidelines and recommends Anthropic’s skill-creator tool for building new skills.

License & community

Licensed under the MIT License – free for commercial and non‑commercial use.
Open issue tracker for bugs and feature requests.
Contributions are welcomed; a CONTRIBUTING.md explains how to add new skills or improve existing ones.

Bottom line – Posit Dev’s skills repository is a practical, standards‑compliant toolbox that lets you turn AI coding assistants into specialised teammates for everyday development, especially within the R/Posit ecosystem.

posit-dev/skills