Agent Skills

Forge ships Agent Skills through two Agent Plugins packages:

• forge for day-to-day development skills
• forge-planning for optional planning and artifact-authoring skills

These shipped skills are the consumer-facing replacement for Forge's retired MCP guided-workflow prompts. The old prompts depended on user-invoked slash commands. Agent Skills are installed with the plugin package and invoked by the model based on the task description and context. Some skills, including create-pr and create-backport, also set user-invocable: true so they can be launched directly as /create-pr or /create-backport.

Shipped packages

Package	Description	Authored in	Generated package output
forge	Day-to-day Forge development skills for building and delivering applications on the platform.	.github/skills/	.github/plugins/forge/
forge-planning	Optional Forge planning and artifact-authoring skills for PRDs, decisions, implementation plans, and technical spikes.	.github/skills/	.github/plugins/forge-planning/

.github/plugins/skill-packages.json maps each shipped skill name to its package, and Sync-PluginSkills.ps1 generates each package's skills/ tree from .github/skills/.

forge package skills

Skill	Summary
api-design	REST and HTTP API design guidance for routes, methods, status codes, RFC 7807 errors, versioning, and security.
aspire	Aspire CLI, AppHost orchestration, service discovery, integrations, dashboard, deployment, and troubleshooting.
azure-devops-cli	Azure DevOps CLI automation for projects, repos, pipelines, builds, pull requests, work items, artifacts, and service endpoints.
azure-devops-pipelines	Azure Pipelines YAML authoring for stages, jobs, steps, variables, triggers, expressions, templates, and CI/CD conventions.
create-backport	Provider-agnostic backport workflow that cherry-picks merged fixes onto release branches and opens the resulting PR.
create-pr	Provider-agnostic pull request authoring with conventional titles, filled templates, and GitHub or Azure DevOps issue linking.
documentation	Forge documentation authoring and review using Diátaxis, Markdown formatting, link checks, and MkDocs validation.
dotnet	.NET coding standards for dependency injection, async, Minimal APIs, EF Core, HTTP clients, observability, security, and package authoring.
dotnet-testing	.NET testing patterns for xUnit, FluentAssertions, NSubstitute, Verify.Xunit, fixtures, traits, and snapshot tests.
forge-standards	Forge platform standards, version compatibility, project structure, emoji conventions, and platform patterns.
git-workflows	Git branching, merging, rebasing, stashing, cherry-picking, backports, commit analysis, and commit message conventions.
github-workflows	GitHub pull request workflows, issue linking, code review, status checks, and gh CLI usage.
migrate-to-v3	Standard Forge v2 to v3 migration workflow for .NET, Aspire, auth, infrastructure, Terraform, and pipeline upgrades.
nuget-manager	NuGet package add, remove, update, compatibility, and Central Package Management operations with the dotnet CLI.
react	React components, hooks, data fetching, caching, bundle optimization, the Mosaic design system, and component testing with Vitest and React Testing Library.
saif-cli	SAIF CLI and Forge MCP guidance for command discovery, templates, docs, services, and saif agent init setup.
terraform	Terraform coding standards for module structure, naming, state, providers, security, resource patterns, HCL, and tfvars.
terraform-testing	Terraform fmt, validate, test, terraform-docs, helper scripts, local module loops, and workspace migration validation.
troubleshoot	Forge troubleshooting and architecture guidance for version drift, Aspire, auth, build failures, TypeSpec, Cosmos DB, and CORS issues.
typescript	TypeScript, Vite, Vitest, Playwright, type safety, async, error handling, and Forge monorepo configuration patterns.
typespec	TypeSpec language authoring for namespaces, models, operations, decorators, templates, versioning, and emitter configuration.
yaml	YAML naming and formatting conventions for Azure Pipelines, MkDocs, Backstage, OpenAPI, Terraform tfvars, GitHub Actions, and Dependabot.

forge-planning package skills

Skill	Summary
create-decision	Architectural decision records for documenting decisions, rationale, alternatives, and superseded decisions.
create-implementation-plan	Structured implementation plans for multi-phase delivery, refactoring, upgrades, migrations, rollouts, and sprint breakdowns.
create-prd	Product Requirements Documents with measurable criteria, user stories, functional requirements, and acceptance criteria.
create-technical-spike	Time-boxed technical investigations, feasibility studies, proofs of concept, and option evaluations.

Repo-local-only skills

Repo-local-only skills under .github/skills/ stay in the repository as authoring guidance and are not shipped in either consumer package. Today that set includes the Forge-maintenance maintain-* skills and the Forge PR code-review skill. Forge's old repo-local custom agents were retired, so release-note generation now lives in repo-local maintain-release and PR review guidance lives in repo-local code-review.

Installing

For marketplace setup, package install commands, and saif agent init details, see Install the Forge plugin packages.

Keeping packages up to date

saif doctor fix --agent checks each installed package's version against the marketplace and re-verifies the Copilot/VS Code registration, fixing anything that has drifted or gone missing. See Update Forge Agent Plugins.