Use when deploying your agent to AWS, or when a deploy has failed. Handles pre-flight validation, CDK/IAM/quota error diagnosis, version management, rollback, and canary deployments. Triggers on: "deploy my agent", "agentcore deploy", "deploy failed", "CDK error", "rollback", "canary deploy", "pin version", "redeploy", "deploy stuck". Not for production hardening — use agents-harden. Not for adding capabilities before deploy — use agents-build or agents-connect. Not for VPC configuration errors — use agents-build.
Use when measuring or improving agent quality and performance — set up evaluators, online monitoring, CI/CD quality gates, observability, or cost optimization. Triggers on: "evaluate my agent", "add evaluator", "measure quality", "quality gate", "run evals", "agent too slow", "why is it slow", "reduce latency", "set up observability", "CloudWatch dashboard", "how much does my agent cost", "cost optimization", "logs not showing up", "logs missing", "spans not found", "eval failing", "eval error", "dev traces", "local traces", "agentcore dev traces", "traces to CloudWatch". Not for debugging errors or crashes — use agents-debug. Slow but correct routes here; broken routes to debug.
Builds generative AI applications on Amazon Bedrock. Covers model invocation (Converse API, InvokeModel), RAG with Knowledge Bases, Bedrock Agents, Guardrails, and AgentCore (including the Harness managed agent loop). Use when invoking models, setting up Knowledge Bases, creating agents, applying guardrails, deploying to AgentCore, migrating/porting/converting a Bedrock Agent (including inline agents) to an AgentCore Harness, troubleshooting Bedrock errors (ThrottlingException, AccessDeniedException), or choosing models (Claude, Llama, Nova, Titan). ALSO USE for prompt caching, quota health checks and throttling diagnosis, cost attribution, migrating between Claude model generations, chunking strategies, API selection (Converse vs InvokeModel), and model selection. Also covers AgentCore Payments setup (x402, microtransactions, Payment Manager, Coinbase CDP, Stripe Privy, 402 Payment Required, paid endpoint). NOT for custom model training, Rekognition, or Comprehend.
Selects, deploys, and customizes AI models on Amazon SageMaker. Fine-tuning (SFT, DPO, RLVR, RLAIF), model selection, dataset preparation, evaluation, deployment to SageMaker endpoints or Bedrock, inference optimization and endpoint diagnostics. Covers the full lifecycle from planning through production. Use when fine-tuning models on SageMaker, choosing/selecting which base model to customize or fine-tune from SageMaker Hub, finding a model to deploy without fine-tuning, transforming datasets for training, checking data readiness, evaluating model quality, deploying to endpoints, benchmarking or optimizing inference, setting up IAM roles and S3 buckets for training jobs, or managing a SageMaker Managed MLflow app. Also use to check endpoint health, diagnose failures, debug latency or errors, or view container logs and CloudWatch metrics. Covers Serverless Model Customization, Nova and OSS deployment paths, and PySDK v3. NOT for Ground Truth labeling, Feature Store, or general-purpose AWS infrastructure.
Adds user authentication to web and mobile apps with Amazon Cognito (user pools and identity pools) and the AWS Amplify client auth libraries. Covers sign-up/sign-in flows and the login page (Cognito-hosted UI / managed login), MFA, password policies, OAuth 2.0 / OIDC flows (auth-code + PKCE, client credentials), social/SAML federation, tokens (ID/access/refresh, rotation, revocation, storage), Cognito Lambda triggers, identity pools (temp AWS creds), and gating API Gateway (or ALB) routes to signed-in users via Cognito/JWT authorizers. Applies when adding a login or sign-up page, configuring a user pool or app client, choosing user pool vs identity pool, wiring social/SAML, refreshing tokens, requiring sign-in on an API Gateway or ALB, or debugging redirect_uri/token/MFA/CORS/federation errors. Does NOT cover Amplify Gen2 backend definitions (defineAuth, npx ampx → aws-amplify), IAM/STS/Identity Center (→ aws-iam), or API Gateway/Lambda resource config beyond the authorizer (→ aws-serverless).
Authors, validates, and troubleshoots AWS CloudFormation templates. Covers template authoring with secure defaults, local validation with either cfn-lint or cloudformation-validate, cfn-guard security and compliance checks as a recommended default, account-aware CloudFormation service pre-deployment validation, CloudFormation Express mode for faster deployments, and root-cause diagnosis of failed stacks using CloudFormation events and CloudTrail correlation. Also covers author-time template intelligence with the CloudFormation Language Server and published cloudformation-validate libraries.
Provisions, scales, and operates Amazon EC2 virtual-machine workloads: instance-type selection (Graviton/Arm64, burstable T credits, GPU, instance store vs EBS), launch templates, Auto Scaling groups (scaling policies, instance refresh, mixed instances, Spot, warm pools, lifecycle hooks), IMDSv2, placement groups, Elastic IPs, AMI lifecycle, and Systems Manager fleet operations (Session Manager, Run Command, Patch Manager). Applies to EC2 instance and fleet questions, InsufficientInstanceCapacity, CPU-credit/surplus charges, IMDSv2 401s, instances stuck in Pending:Wait, ASG not replacing unhealthy instances, status-check failures, SSH refused/timed out, or instances missing as SSM managed nodes. For a single secure instance launch, the launching-ec2-instance-with-best-practices skill is more appropriate; for instance profiles, see setting-up-ec2-instance-profiles; for Image Builder, see amazon-ec2-image-builder. Does NOT cover Lambda, ECS/Fargate, EKS, VPC/ALB/NLB design, or IAM policy authoring.
Builds and deploys containerized workloads on Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Elastic Container Service (ECS), Fargate, and ECR (Elastic Container Registry). Covers general EKS knowledge, Karpenter, AWS Load Balancer Controller and leveraging various open source Kubernetes projects with EKS. Covers general ECS knowledge, task definitions, Fargate services, ECS Exec, ECS Express Mode and ECS Managed Instances. Covers general Elastic Beanstalk knowledge, Elastic Beanstalk configuration and platforms supported by Elastic Beanstalk. Covers general ECR knowledge, ECR repository setup and lifecycle policies. Includes recommending, enabling, and reading Amazon ECS Action Logs to troubleshoot control-plane failures (deployment rollback/circuit-breaker, task placement, scaling, task replacement). Applies when deploying, debugging, or optimizing containers on AWS. Should be used instead of relying on internal knowledge for these services.
Routes any task involving AWS databases — choosing, comparing, recommending, getting started with, or operating a database — to the correct service-specific skill. Supersedes general training-data knowledge with post-training service updates, corrected limitations, and decision procedures for relational (Aurora, DSQL, RDS), key-value (DynamoDB), wide-column (Keyspaces), document (DocumentDB), graph (Neptune), time-series (Timestream), and in-memory/caching (ElastiCache, MemoryDB) workloads. Activates when a user describes building an application on AWS that will store, retrieve, or manage data, even if they do not mention 'database' explicitly.
Provides verified corrections for IAM behaviors that AI agents frequently get wrong — policy evaluation edge cases, trust policy gotchas, STS session limits, Organizations quirks, and SAML/MFA specifics. Also provides structured workflows for IAM role management and baseline policy generation from application source code or a Terraform plan JSON. Covers condition operator safety (ForAnyValue/ForAllValues with Null checks), bucket policy deny patterns (VPC endpoint restrictions, org paths), confused deputy protection, and service role creation for AWS services (Glue, CloudTrail, Lambda, ECS, etc.) with aws:SourceAccount/aws:SourceArn trust conditions. Applies when creating IAM roles, writing IAM or bucket policies, generating policies from application source code or a Terraform plan JSON, working with STS, Organizations, or condition operators, or any task needing a service or execution role. Does not cover non-IAM authorization like Cognito user-pool policies or app-level RBAC.
Guides general use of AWS messaging and streaming services. Covers Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon MQ, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Data Firehose, Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink, and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK). Use when reasoning about messaging and streaming patterns. Also identifies which AWS service owns each customer communication channel: email (Amazon SES), and WhatsApp, SMS, MMS, RCS, voice and mobile push (the AWS End User Messaging family of services). Routes the request to the specialized skill for that channel. Defers to the channel's specialized skill when the user already named a specific channel. In general, use specific skills or documentation searches for detailed service-specific questions. Do NOT use for MSK or Managed Service for Apache Flink questions, prefer specific skills. Does not configure customer communication channels; defers to specific skills.
Routes AWS networking requests to the correct service skill for implementation. Covers Route 53 (DNS, health checks, routing policies, Resolver, DNS Firewall), CloudFront (caching, edge, OAC, mTLS, signed URLs), Transit Gateway (multi-VPC hub, segmentation, centralized egress), Direct Connect (hybrid link, DX Gateway, MACsec), Site-to-Site VPN (IPsec tunnels, static or BGP), WAF (web ACLs, AWS Managed Rules, rate-based rules, Bot and Fraud Control), and Shield Advanced (L3/L4 DDoS). Applicable when creating, configuring, troubleshooting, or designing across these services, choosing between them, or diagnosing connectivity or traffic-filtering issues. Not for VPC subnets and route tables, load balancers, VPC endpoints, PrivateLink, API Gateway, IAM policy logic, container or serverless networking, or IaC authoring.
Builds, configures, debugs, and optimizes AWS observability — operator-symptom questions and detecting Omni vs classic CloudWatch. CloudWatch: Log Insights, alarms, Dynamic Instrumentation, and Application Signals — instrumenting/onboarding a service to Application Signals with ADOT on EC2/ECS/EKS/Lambda: auto-instrumentation, monitored service, reporting telemetry, ServiceEvents, CI/CD metadata, Terraform/manifest. Also fleet health views. CloudWatch Omni on an existing Space: SQL over logs and traces, PromQL over metrics, Omni dashboards, Omni alerts, context graph for root cause, programmatic/IaC access (API/SDK/CLI/CloudFormation) and driving Omni from a coding agent or skills, and evaluating AI agent quality from traces — on-demand and continuous online scoring of live agent traffic, readback, and custom trace evaluators. For first-time Omni setup — creating a Space, granting access, ingestion, or ADOT instrumentation — use setting-up-cloudwatch-observability. Not for app logging or threat detection.
AWS SDK for JavaScript v3 development patterns. Use when writing JavaScript or TypeScript code that uses AWS services via @aws-sdk/* packages (aws-sdk-js-v3), or when asked about schemas, runtime validation, serialization, or code generation in the context of the JS/TS AWS SDK.
AWS SDK for Python (boto3/botocore) development patterns. You MUST use this skill when writing Python code that uses AWS services via boto3 or botocore. This includes creating service clients or resources, configuring sessions and credentials, handling errors with ClientError, using paginators and waiters, S3 file transfers and presigned URLs, DynamoDB table operations, and any boto3/botocore client configuration. Use this skill whenever Python code imports boto3 or botocore, or when the user asks about AWS operations in Python.
Secret safety for AWS Secrets Manager, secret management, credentials, API keys, tokens, and passwords. Prevents AI agents from directly fetching secret values and teaches runtime dynamic references with asm-exec so plaintext never enters the LLM context window.
Covers AWS security services and workflows — Security Hub V2 (OCSF) findings, connectors, aggregators, automation rules, and security posture summaries; Security Hub CSPM (V1/ASFF) controls and compliance standards; GuardDuty threat findings; Inspector vulnerability findings; Macie sensitive data findings; Detective investigation; and Security Lake configuration and data aggregation. Applicable when questions involve security posture, Exposure findings, CSPM failed controls, threat findings, vulnerability findings, sensitive data findings, automation rules, or cross-service security configuration across AWS environments. Procedures use standard AWS CLI syntax and work with or without the AWS MCP server.
Plain text files in a repository that tell a coding agent how the project works: commands to run, conventions to follow and things to avoid. CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, cursor rules and skills are the common kinds.
CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md?
CLAUDE.md is read by Claude Code. AGENTS.md is an open format that Codex, Cursor and other agents read. Many projects keep one and point the other at it.
What is a skill?
A folder with a SKILL.md that describes one capability, such as filling PDFs or reviewing code. The agent loads it only when the task calls for it.
Can I search my own team's files too?
Your agents already can, over MCP, limited to the files you're allowed to read. Searching them from this page is coming.
AWSSkill