Agent Skills in WordPress Studio

Agent Skills give your AI coding agent specialized knowledge about WordPress development. Studio bundles a set of skills you can install into your sites so agents like Claude Code or Cursor pick them up automatically.

What are Agent Skills?

An Agent Skill is a SKILL.md file that tells the agent how to approach a specific area of WordPress development. When a skill is installed in a site, the agent reads it and applies the guidance it contains before starting work.

You can use skills to help agents handle tasks like:

• Building a custom block with the correct block.json structure
• Creating a plugin that follows WordPress coding standards and security practices
• Working with REST API routes and authentication

Available skills in Studio

Studio ships with the following built-in skills:

• Studio CLI: WordPress development workflows using Studio CLI
• Plugin Development: Hooks, settings API, security, and packaging
• Block Development: Block.json, attributes, rendering, and deprecations
• Block Themes: Theme.json, templates, patterns, and style variations
• REST API — Routes, endpoints, schema, and authentication
• WP-CLI & Ops — CLI commands, automation, and search-replace

Where skills are stored

When a skill is installed, Studio copies it into the site directory:

For agents that use Claude’s directory layout, Studio also creates a symlink at .claude/skills/\<skill-id> pointing to the same location. No additional configuration is needed for Claude Code to pick up the skill.

Installing and removing skills in Studio

There are two ways to manage skills in Studio – globally and per site.

You can find the global settings for skills under Settings → Skills modal:

From that screen you can:

• Click Install next to an individual skill

• Click Install all to install every available skill at once
• Open the toggle menu next to an installed skill and select Remove to uninstall it

Managing skills per site

The per-site modal reflects the actual state of the .agents/skills/ directory on disk for a specific site. You can use it to manage skills for a specific site without changing the global selection.

You can access the per site skills selection from the Overview tab in the Edit site modal.