What are skills?
Studio's skills let a coding agent, such as Claude Code, Cursor or Codex, do Studio tasks for you from a request in plain English. Read this to know what a skill is, how your agent chooses one, and when another tool fits better.
The example is the team blog: a Blog post content type served under /blog, and an Avatar component that its developers want to use in Studio.
What is a skill?
A skill is a Markdown file that tells an agent how to do one Studio task: what to read, what to change, what to ask you, and how to check that it worked. register-component, for example, reads a React component such as Avatar and writes its registerComponent call.
The pack has 110 skills. Every one is listed in the Skills catalog. They ship in Contentstack's official agent skills bundle as one skill, studio, with every other skill as a file inside it.
How does your agent choose a skill?
You ask in plain English. The pack's router, a skill called studio, acts on any message about Studio. It looks your request up in the pack's index, then reads and follows the one skill that matches.
| You ask | Your agent uses |
|---|---|
| "Set up Studio in this app" | convert-project-to-studio |
| "Register my Avatar component with Studio" | register-component |
| "Build a Blog post template connected to the Blog post content type" | build-connected-template |
| "Is Studio working?" | verify-setup |
| "Studio is broken, help me debug it" | troubleshoot |
When a request needs several skills, the router runs them in the order they depend on each other. For example, it installs before it authors.
What can a skill reach?
A skill reaches what your agent reaches: your project's files, your terminal, and any MCP server set up in your editor. To create content types, entries or compositions in your stack, skills need the Contentstack MCP server. Connect skills to your stack sets it up.
When is another tool better?
- For a command you run the same way every time, use the Studio CLI.
- To create or change compositions from your own code, use the Studio API.
- To start from a Figma file, use the Studio Figma plugin.
- To understand every change as you make it, follow Install Studio by hand.
Where do you start?
- Install the skills from Contentstack's official agent skills bundle.
- Connect skills to your stack.
- Read Is it safe to let an agent run skills? before you point an agent at a real stack.
If it doesn't work
- The agent says the skill pack looks mis-installed. It couldn't find one of the files inside
studio. Install the skills again, as Install the skills describes. - The agent answers without using a skill. The router acts only on messages about Studio. Say that your request is about Studio, such as "a Studio template" or "a Studio section".