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Getting started

Cardano Dev Skills works in four modes. Pick the one that matches your agent.

In any Claude Code session:

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

Installed once, active in every Claude Code session in any directory. Verify with:

/plugin list

Run the two commands in that order. Adding the marketplace first is what registers it; going straight to /plugin install makes the client resolve the repository itself, which can fall back to an SSH URL and fail with git@github.com: Permission denied (publickey) even though this repository is public and clones fine over HTTPS.

Claude Cowork (desktop, web, mobile)

Cowork uses the same plugin format, so this marketplace works there unchanged.

  1. Open Customize and go to the Plugins tab.
  2. Under Personal plugins, click +, then Add marketplace.
  3. Choose Add from a repository and enter: https://github.com/cardano-foundation/cardano-dev-skills
  4. Install cardano-dev-skills from the marketplace once it syncs.

You get the same skills as the Claude Code plugin. Cowork syncs the whole repository, and docs/sources/ is roughly 30 MB of bundled documentation, so the first sync is not instant.

Install the per-project directive

Even with the plugin installed globally, Claude sometimes answers Cardano questions from training data instead of consulting bundled skills and docs. Run the cardano-context skill once per project to install a durable directive:

/cardano-context

What it does:

  • Writes a version-tagged block into the project’s CLAUDE.md. Claude Code re-injects CLAUDE.md into every conversation turn, so the directive survives compaction and applies on every new session.
  • Tells Claude to treat training data as potentially stale for Cardano, to bias toward invoking cardano-dev-skills:* skills, to search bundled docs/sources/ before falling back on memory, and to cite what it used.
  • Commit CLAUDE.md and teammates inherit the directive on clone.
  • Re-running is safe: same version is a no-op; older versions are atomically replaced.

Codex / other agents

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

Standalone

Skills are pure Markdown — read skills/*/SKILL.md directly, or grep them.

First prompt

Once installed, ask the agent something concrete that should match a skill:

“Scaffold a new Cardano project with Aiken on-chain and Mesh SDK off-chain.”

You should see the agent invoke the scaffold-project skill. If it doesn’t, nudge explicitly:

“Use the scaffold-project skill from cardano-dev-skills.”

See How it works for the three context mechanisms and how to tell when one of them is doing the work.