epic: Agent Skills — built-in operational skills, authoring guide, registry distribution

[joshrotenberg]

Agent Skills roadmap

This issue tracks the remaining work for redisctl MCP Agent Skills. The runtime and initial catalog are now shipped; the backlog below focuses on gaps rather than the original design questions.

Current state (2026-08-11)

redisctl MCP includes a runtime skill loader with:

• bundled skills in crates/redisctl-mcp/skills/
• an optional --skills-dir
• the REDISCTL_MCP_SKILLS_DIR environment override
• bundled fallback behavior for packaged installations

The current built-in catalog contains 10 skills:

• cloud-database-provisioning
• enterprise-health-check
• data-explorer
• data-modeling-advisor
• compare-approaches
• index-advisor
• index-audit
• index-migration
• index-ab-test
• query-tuning

Completed

• Choose and ship the repository layout for bundled skills
• Implement runtime discovery and loading
• Package bundled skills with the MCP server
• Add Enterprise health-check guidance
• Add Cloud database-provisioning guidance
• Add the initial Redis data, indexing, and query-tuning catalog
• Validate bundled skill metadata and referenced MCP tool names (test(mcp): establish the 1.0 catalog contract #1096)

Remaining skill coverage

Enterprise

• Capacity planning
• Cluster troubleshooting
• Database performance analysis

Cloud

• Migration planning

Add new skills only where a repeatable, multi-tool workflow is clearer and safer than an MCP tool description or prompt.

Remaining platform and documentation work

• Add a skill-authoring guide with the supported frontmatter and tool-reference conventions
• Document discovery, overrides, and installation for users
• Decide whether an external registry/distribution mechanism is needed
• Keep the catalog synchronized with user-facing documentation

MCP prompts remain complementary: prompts provide interactive starting points, while skills describe reusable workflows that clients and agents can discover.

[joshrotenberg]

The 1.0-release-blocking validation slice of this epic is complete via #1096:

• bundled SKILL.md frontmatter is parsed and validated;
• skill names must match their directories and remain unique;
• descriptions and workflow bodies must be non-empty;
• tool references in bundled workflows must resolve against the recorded MCP catalog;
• the checks run alongside the feature-aware 375-tool catalog, schema, annotation, and safety-tier contract.

The broader skill catalog, authoring, and registry/distribution work remains valuable and this update leaves #718 open; it is no longer a redisctl 1.0 release blocker.