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Cardano Dev Skills

Cardano Dev Skills is the go-to toolkit for building on Cardano with a coding agent. It gives the agent a focused skill for each stage of development and bundled documentation from active Cardano projects, refreshed weekly, so the agent builds from current sources and moves faster than it would on training data alone. The skills are plain Markdown, and any coding agent that reads Markdown can use them.

Install with one prompt

Paste this into your coding agent:

prompt
Walk me through installing Cardano Dev Skills:
https://github.com/cardano-foundation/cardano-dev-skills

Set it up in Claude Code​

  1. Install Claude Code. If it is not on your machine yet, the quickstart takes a few minutes.

  2. Add the marketplace, then install the plugin. In any Claude Code session:

    Claude Code
    /plugin marketplace add cardano-foundation/cardano-dev-skills
    /plugin install cardano-dev-skills@cardano-dev-skills

    Run the two commands in that order. Installing without adding the marketplace first can fail with an SSH permission error, even though the repository is public.

  3. Verify. /plugin list shows cardano-dev-skills enabled. The plugin installs once and is active in every session, in any directory. Each new session now opens by reporting how fresh the bundled docs are:

    session start
    [Cardano Dev Skills] Docs loaded: 72 sources, 3925 files (updated 2d ago)

    Your counts and dates will differ as the sources refresh.

  4. Wire it into your project. In the project you are working on:

    Claude Code
    /cardano-context

    This writes a small directive block into the project's CLAUDE.md, telling Claude to consult the bundled skills and docs before its training data. Claude Code reads CLAUDE.md on every turn, so the directive holds across sessions, and it travels with the repository when you commit it.

  5. Put it to work. Typing / lists the skills the plugin added, one per workflow: /scaffold-project, /write-validator, /debug-transaction and the rest. Or start wide:

    first prompt
    Brainstorm a Cardano app with me, then walk me through building it.

    The agent reads the bundled sources as it works. If it answers Cardano questions from memory in some project, run /cardano-context there.

Other agents​

Claude Cowork uses the same plugin format. Open Customize, go to the Plugins tab, add a marketplace from the repository URL https://github.com/cardano-foundation/cardano-dev-skills, and install cardano-dev-skills once it syncs. The first sync pulls the full bundled docs, so it is not instant.

Codex, and anything else that reads Markdown: clone the repository and link the skills into your project, then point the file your agent reads at startup at them, the way /cardano-context does for Claude Code.

git clone https://github.com/cardano-foundation/cardano-dev-skills.git
cd your-project
ln -s ../cardano-dev-skills/skills .agents/skills

What's inside​

A skill is a focused workflow guide: scaffolding a project, writing a validator, building a transaction, debugging one that fails. Alongside the skills, the plugin bundles documentation from active Cardano projects, mirrored locally and auto-refreshed weekly. The scope is the developer toolchain, meaning SDKs, validator libraries, protocol specs and reference implementations, not the product docs of deployed apps. The full list of skills and sources is on the Cardano Dev Skills site.

Going further​

  • SDKs and protocols ship their own AI context to layer on top: Mesh AI for the Mesh API, Masumi Skills for Masumi's agent stack.
  • An agent can also work against live chain state, reading your balances and drafting transactions you sign: chain access over MCP.
  • With the agent set up, your first transaction is the natural next build.