Skip to content

Discover Agent Skills

In this lab you will explore how your AI coding agent discovers and uses AWS skills at runtime. Skills are curated knowledge packages that give your agent domain-specific expertise — deployment patterns, best practices, and step-by-step workflows for AWS services.

Overview

Agent skills provide your AI coding agent with deep AWS expertise beyond what general-purpose models know. When you ask your agent to build something on AWS, it can discover relevant skills dynamically and use them to guide its work — producing better IAM policies, following Well-Architected best practices, and using correct API patterns.

What You'll Learn

  • How agents discover available AWS skills through the MCP Server
  • What information a skill provides (workflows, best practices, reference architectures)
  • How skill-guided output differs from unguided responses

Instructions

Explore

Ask your agent to show you what AWS skills are available. Observe how it discovers and lists capabilities provided through the MCP Server connection.

Desired outcome: Your agent returns a list of available AWS skills with descriptions of what each skill covers.

Hints:

  1. Try asking your agent directly: "What AWS skills do you have available?"
  2. Skills are discovered at runtime through the MCP Server — your agent queries what's available each time
  3. Look for skills related to deployment, security, and specific AWS services
Step-by-Step Walkthrough

  1. Open your AI coding agent's chat interface

  2. Enter the following prompt:

What AWS skills are available to you through the MCP Server? List them with a brief description of each.

  1. Your agent will query the MCP Server and return a list of available skills. You should see skills covering areas such as:
  2. Serverless application deployment
  3. Infrastructure as Code patterns
  4. Security best practices

  5. Service-specific guidance (Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, etc.)

  6. Pick one skill that interests you and ask for more detail:

Tell me more about the [skill name] skill. What workflows and best practices does it include?

  1. Observe how the agent retrieves detailed skill content including step-by-step workflows, decision frameworks, and reference configurations.

  2. Note the difference between a general question ("How do I deploy a Lambda?") and a skill-guided response — skills provide opinionated, production-ready patterns rather than generic documentation summaries.

Validation

Your progress is tracked automatically via the CloudWatch dashboard. For this lab, successful skill discovery is confirmed when:

  • Your agent has made at least one MCP Server call (visible in CloudTrail)
  • You can see available skills listed in your agent's response

To verify manually, ask your agent:

Check CloudTrail for any recent events with "mcp" in the user agent string from the last hour.

Agent-Specific Tips

Claude Code discovers skills automatically when you ask AWS-related questions. The MCP Server connection enables skill discovery without any additional configuration.

Try the slash command approach:

/mcp — then ask about available AWS skills

Claude Code will show which MCP tools and skills are accessible in your current session.

Kiro discovers skills through the same MCP Server runtime mechanism as other agents. When you ask about AWS capabilities, Kiro queries available skills dynamically.

Additionally, Kiro's hooks can be configured to automatically suggest relevant skills when you create certain file types — for example, suggesting a deployment skill when you create a CDK or CloudFormation file.

Cursor discovers skills at runtime through the MCP Server connection. Skill discovery works the same way as other agents — ask about available AWS capabilities and Cursor will query the MCP Server.

:::alert{type="info"} Cursor does not have a dedicated skills panel. Skills are discovered conversationally by asking your agent what AWS capabilities are available through the MCP connection.

:::

Codex discovers skills through the MCP Server at runtime. Ask about available AWS skills and Codex will query and list what's available.

:::alert{type="info"} Codex does not have a dedicated skills browser UI. Use natural language prompts to discover and invoke skills through the MCP Server connection.

:::