We're excited to introduce Spice Skills, an open-source collection of packaged instructions for AI coding agents working with Spice.ai OSS. Each skill covers a specific capability -- federated SQL queries, data acceleration, vector and full-text search, LLM inference, and MCP tool use -- so agents can configure and operate Spice correctly without manual prompting.
Skills follow the open Agent Skills format and work with Claude Code via Claude Skills, Cursor, and any agent that supports the standard.
What's Included
The initial release covers the core Spice workflows:
| Skill | What the agent can do |
|---|---|
spice-setup | Install Spice, initialize a project, and run the runtime |
spice-connect-data | Connect to data sources and query across them with federated SQL |
spice-acceleration | Accelerate data locally for sub-second query performance |
spice-search | Search with vector similarity, full-text keywords, or hybrid RRF |
spice-ai | Add AI capabilities -- chat, text-to-SQL, tools, memory, model routing |
spice-caching | Cache query and search results with TTL and stale-while-revalidate |
spice-secrets | Manage credentials with secret stores |
spice-text-to-sql | Convert natural language to SQL using the /v1/nsql endpoint |
spice-terraform | Provision and manage Spice infrastructure with Terraform |
Each skill ships as a SKILL.md -- instructions the agent reads directly -- along with optional helper scripts and example configurations.
Demo of basic usage with Spice Skills
Installation
Claude Code (Claude Skills):
/plugin marketplace add spiceai/skills
/plugin install spice@spiceai-skillsSkills become available as /spice:spice-setup, /spice:spice-ai, /spice:spicepod-config, and so on.
Other agents (npx):
npx skills add spiceai/skillsOnce installed, skills are invoked automatically when the agent detects a relevant task -- no manual prompting required.
Why Skills
Working with a new runtime in an AI coding agent typically means copy-pasting docs, correcting hallucinated API shapes, and re-explaining configuration patterns. Skills solve this by giving the agent accurate, structured knowledge up front.
For Spice specifically, this matters because the configuration surface is broad: 30+ data connectors, multiple acceleration engines, LLM providers, embedding models, and a growing set of tools. For teams building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines or agentic AI applications, a well-scoped skill keeps the agent on the right path without requiring the developer to re-explain Spice's configuration model each session.
Skill Structure
Each skill follows a consistent layout:
spice-setup/
SKILL.md # Agent instructions
scripts/ # Helper automation (optional)
examples/ # Example spicepod.yaml configurations (optional)
The format is intentionally minimal. SKILL.md is plain text the agent can parse; scripts handle anything that benefits from automation.
Get Started
The skills repository is open source at github.com/spiceai/skills. Contributions for additional connectors, deployment patterns, and Spice Cloud workflows are welcome.
