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

Once shiny is a dependency of your project, use library-skills to make the bundled skill available to your agent. Run these commands from your own project directory (where shiny is installed) — library-skills finds the skill in your installed shiny package, so this is not tied to the py-shiny source repository.

Claude Code

Install the skill into your project’s .claude/skills directory:

uvx library-skills --claude

Other agents

Install the skill into the standard .agents/skills location that most agents read:

uvx library-skills

On Windows, add the --copy flag:

uvx library-skills --copy

By default, library-skills symlinks the packaged skill into your project rather than copying it. This means the skill stays in sync automatically when you upgrade shiny — there is no separate step to re-install it after an upgrade.

Tip

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 list

See shiny skills --help for more details.