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Reusable agent skills across CLI and Registry

ToolHive now supports agent skills - reusable bundles of instructions and configuration that teach AI agents how to perform specific tasks. MCP servers give agents the raw tools they can call; skills give them the knowledge of when, why, and how to use those tools effectively. With ToolHive, teams can create skills, publish them to a registry, and install them across supported AI clients from a single CLI.

ToolHive CLI: Install, package, and publish skills​

The ToolHive CLI adds full lifecycle management for agent skills, from discovery through distribution:

  • Install skills from multiple sources including the ToolHive Registry Server, OCI registries, or Git repositories. ToolHive writes skill files to your AI client's skills directory automatically, so the agent discovers them without manual file management.
  • Scope skills to users or projects depending on whether you want a skill available across all your work or limited to a specific codebase. User-scoped skills install globally, while project-scoped skills activate only when working in that repo.
  • Build and publish skills as OCI artifacts to share them with your team through any container registry. The CLI handles validation, packaging, and pushing using your existing registry credentials.

Skills follow the Agent Skills specification, an open standard for AI coding agents. See the skills management guide for the full CLI reference and the client compatibility page for the current list of skill-capable clients.

Registry Server: Centralized skill discovery and versioning​

The Registry Server adds an extensions API for publishing and managing skills alongside your MCP server registry:

  • Publish versioned skills with namespace isolation using reverse-DNS notation to prevent naming collisions across teams. The registry tracks multiple versions of each skill and automatically updates the latest pointer as new versions are published.
  • Search and filter skills by keyword, status, or namespace with cursor-based pagination, so teams can discover relevant skills from large catalogs without scrolling through everything.
  • Lifecycle management lets you mark skills as active, deprecated, or archived, giving platform teams clear controls over which skills are approved for use across the organization.

Skills are stored under a separate extensions API path and not intermixed with MCP server entries. See the registry skills guide for the API reference and publishing workflow.

note

Skills management in the ToolHive Desktop UI is coming soon, bringing discovery and installation into the app alongside MCP server management.

Getting started​

For detailed release notes, check the project repositories:

You can find all ToolHive documentation on the Stacklok documentation site.