Skills

Install Trigger.dev agent skills to teach any AI coding assistant how to write tasks, realtime frontends, and chat.agent AI agents.

What are agent skills?

Skills are portable instruction sets that teach AI coding assistants how to use Trigger.dev effectively. Unlike vendor-specific config files (.cursor/rules, CLAUDE.md), skills use an open standard that works across all major AI assistants, so Cursor users and Claude Code users get the same knowledge from a single install.

Each skill is a directory containing a SKILL.md file: YAML frontmatter (name, description) plus markdown instructions with patterns, examples, and common mistakes that AI assistants discover on demand and follow.

Skills pair with the MCP Server, which gives your assistant live access to your project (deploy, trigger, monitor). Skills teach it how to write the code; the MCP server lets it act on your project. See how they fit together.

Installation

The skills ship inside the trigger.dev CLI, version-matched to the SDK you have installed. Run:

npx trigger.dev@latest skills

The CLI detects your installed AI tools, lets you pick which skills to install, and copies each one into that tool’s native skills directory (.claude/skills/, .cursor/skills/, .github/skills/, .agents/skills/). It also writes a one-line pointer into your primary instructions file (CLAUDE.md, .cursor/rules, etc.) so your assistant always knows the skills are there and loads the right one on demand.

When you run trigger dev for the first time, the CLI offers to install the skills for you.

Because the skills are bundled with the CLI, the guidance your assistant gets is pinned to the Trigger.dev version you are actually building against, instead of always being the latest from the internet.

Non-interactive install

Pass --target to choose tools and -y to install every skill without prompting (useful in scripts and CI):

npx trigger.dev@latest skills --target claude-code --target cursor -y

Available skills

Skill	Use for	Covers
authoring-tasks	Writing background and scheduled tasks	task/schemaTask, retries, queues, waits, idempotency, metadata, triggering, cron, trigger.config.ts
realtime-and-frontend	Live run updates and triggering from the browser	runs.subscribeToRun, @trigger.dev/react-hooks, public access tokens, streams
authoring-chat-agent	Building durable AI chat agents	chat.agent run loop, toStreamTextOptions, server actions, useChat transport, tools, lifecycle hooks
chat-agent-advanced	Advanced chat.agent patterns	sessions, human-in-the-loop, sub-agents, compaction, fast starts, resilience, version upgrades

Not sure which to install? Pick authoring-tasks; it covers the most common patterns for writing Trigger.dev tasks.

Supported AI assistants

Skills use the open Agent Skills standard. The CLI installs natively into the tools that support a skills directory today:

Assistant	Installs to
Claude Code	.claude/skills/
Cursor	.cursor/skills/
GitHub Copilot (VS Code)	.github/skills/
Codex CLI, Jules, OpenCode	.agents/skills/

Using a tool that does not support skills yet? Select “Unsupported target” in the installer for manual setup instructions.

Keeping skills updated

Skills are pinned to your installed CLI version. To refresh them after upgrading Trigger.dev, run npx trigger.dev@latest skills again, or accept the prompt that trigger dev shows when a newer version is available. Re-running overwrites the installed skill files in place without creating duplicates.

Next steps

MCP Server

Give your AI assistant direct access to Trigger.dev tools and APIs.

Building with AI

See how skills and the MCP server compare, plus a copy-paste context snippet.

Writing tasks

Learn the task patterns that skills teach your AI assistant.

AI agents

Build durable chat agents with chat.agent, the focus of two of the skills.