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Agent skills

catladder ships a set of agent skills — markdown guides that teach AI coding agents how to work with a catladder project. Pipeline generation materializes them into the consumer repo's .claude/skills/ directory (and, opt-in via agentSkills: { targets: ["claude-code", "agents"] }, into the cross-agent .agents/skills/ location), so agents always see the documentation matching the installed catladder version.

The skills are plain markdown and just as useful for human readers — these are the skills shipped with this version:

  • catladder-builds — Configuring how a component is built in a catladder project — the build config in catladder.ts (build types node / rails / meteor / custom, build & start commands, artifacts, caching, lint/test/audit jobs, the Docker image, project-declared job images, and shared workspace builds).
  • catladder-cli — How to invoke the catladder CLI non-interactively — command structure, passing inputs via flags or --inputs JSON, skipping prompts, and the full generated command reference.
  • catladder-config — Working with catladder, the framework that generates this repository's CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI and/or GitHub Actions) from catladder.ts.
  • catladder-deploys — Configuring how a component is deployed in a catladder project — the deploy config in catladder.ts (deploy types kubernetes / google-cloudrun / npmPackage / pages / dockerTag / custom, manual vs auto deploy, resources, autoscaling, health checks, CloudSQL/MongoDB, Cloud Run services/jobs/worker pools, cron jobs).
  • catladder-migrate-ci-backend — Guiding a catladder project from one CI backend to the other — GitLab CI → GitHub Actions or GitHub Actions → GitLab CI — using the pipelines config to run both in parallel first, then cutting over. Covers the blockers to check up front (unsupported features, secrets vault, release tokens, container registry) and the manual cleanup a cut-over needs.
  • catladder-migrate-package-manager — Migrating a catladder project's node package manager — yarn → pnpm (via pnpm import, keeping the resolved versions) or pnpm → yarn — including the workspace file, the yarn-isms in scripts and catladder.ts, phantom dependencies, and what changes in the generated pipeline.
  • catladder-migrate-release-method — Migrating a catladder project from one release method to another — semantic-release (conventional commits) ↔ changesets (.changeset/*.md files) — including backfilling changesets for everything merged since the last release tag so the changelog and the version bump stay correct.
  • catladder-pipelines — Understanding and debugging the CI/CD pipelines catladder generates (GitLab CI and GitHub Actions) — pipeline triggers, stages, environments, caching, job images, releases, and infrastructure drift.
  • catladder-releases — How releases work in a catladder project — the releases config in catladder.ts (manual vs automatic releasing, and the release method: semantic-release from conventional commits, or changesets from .changeset/*.md files), the version/tag/changelog flow, and the security-audit gate that every release must pass.
  • catladder-secrets — Managing environment variables and secrets in a catladder project.