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Use CAT from a coding agent

A coding agent with the CAT skills installed reads this documentation before it writes a project file, and writes it right. Here is what the skills are, the three ways to get them, and what to do when the agent and the CLI are on different versions.

The CAT skills are short procedures a coding agent loads when your request matches one of them: a data source to add, a test to write, results that must land in a pipeline, a failed test to explain. Each one is a SKILL.md that links the page of this documentation that owns every fact, so the agent reads the reference instead of remembering it. There are eighteen, one per situation, all named cat-<situation>.

Get the skills

Three ways; all three give you the same folders.

  • The installer. npx skills add justcatit/cat-skills puts every skill into your agent’s skills folder.
  • A clone. git clone https://github.com/justcatit/cat-skills, then copy or symlink each cat-* folder into the agent’s skills folder. Agents look one level deep: the clone itself dropped into the skills folder is not found.
  • The zip from the Releases page, for a machine that cannot reach GitHub. Unpack it into the skills folder. It also carries the documentation pages the skills link, as markdown next to each skill, for an agent that cannot fetch a URL.

Where the skills folder is depends on the agent. For Claude Code it is ~/.claude/skills/ for every project, or .claude/skills/ inside one project. For Cursor it is ~/.cursor/skills/ or .cursor/skills/ in the project; Cursor also reads a .claude/skills/ folder, so one project folder serves both. For Codex and other agents, use the folder their documentation names; npx skills add knows the common ones.

Install the skills and the CAT CLI in either order. The skills tell the agent to run catcli for checks and runs; a session started before either was installed does not see it and has to be restarted.

Install the skills at project scope, committed next to the .cat.yaml project: every colleague’s agent, and every agent in a pipeline, then reads the same version of the skills as the project was written with. Pin the CAT CLI the same way.

Versions

The tip of the cat-skills repository always carries the skills of the newest CAT CLI. The tag v<version> matches an older CLI; check out that tag when the agent must match an older installation. When catcli --version is newer than the skills you have, update the skills: npx skills add justcatit/cat-skills again, or the new zip. The skills describe how to use CAT; a newer CLI with older skills works, but the agent will not know what the newer version added.

What the agent does with them

The agent sees only each skill’s name and its description until your request matches one; then it loads the skill and follows it: reads the pages the skill links, checks the project with catcli show, writes the block, and tells you what it did. A skill never contains a fact of its own; when the documentation changes, the next skills release follows it.

The same skills, packaged with their pages, are inside CAT Studio for CAT Pilot.

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