Agent Skills
If you use a coding agent such as Claude Code or Cursor to help you build Shiny apps, you can teach it how to use Shiny for Python’s public APIs by installing the Agent Skill that ships with the shiny package.
What is the bundled skill?
An Agent Skill is a set of reference docs, written for coding agents, that teaches them how to work with a particular library. The shiny package ships a single skill, shiny-for-python, that teaches agents how to build, style, test, and debug Shiny for Python apps using shiny’s public APIs.
The skill lives inside the installed package (under shiny/.agents/skills/) and follows the Agent Skills specification and the library-skills convention of shipping skills with the library they document. Its SKILL.md is a routing index: the agent reads it first, then follows links into per-topic reference files as needed. Because the skill ships with the package, it always matches the version of shiny you have installed, and there is nothing extra to download.
Install the skill into your project
The skill ships inside the package, so installing shiny installs it too — you only need to point your agent at it. Use library-skills to do that.
library-skills reads the dependencies of whatever project you run it in, then installs the skills bundled with the packages that project has installed. So run it from the project where shiny is installed. Running it in an empty directory, or in a clone of the py-shiny source repository, will install nothing.
Install the skill into your project’s .claude/skills directory:
uvx library-skills --claudeInstall the skill into the standard .agents/skills location that most agents read:
uvx library-skillsOn Windows, add the --copy flag:
uvx library-skills --copyBy default, library-skills symlinks the packaged skill into your project rather than copying it. This means the skill keeps tracking your installed version of shiny as you upgrade — there is no separate step to re-install it afterwards.
Because library-skills works from your project’s dependencies rather than from any one package, the same command also installs the skills bundled with your other dependencies, if they ship any.
See uvx library-skills --help for the full list of options.
Inspect the skill without installing it
The shiny command line interface can show you the bundled skill directly, which is handy if you want to read it before installing or point another tool at it.
List the bundled skills with their names and descriptions:
shiny skills listSee shiny skills --help for more details.