Agent Skills Support: npm for AI Coding Agents

We've added support for Vercel Agent Skills in Achromatic Pro. This means AI coding assistants like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex now have access to 10+ years of React and Next.js optimization knowledge when working with your codebase.

What Are Agent Skills?

Agent Skills is a new open-source project from Vercel Labs that works like npm, but for AI coding agents. Instead of installing packages for your app, you install skills for your AI assistant.

Skills are packaged instructions and scripts that extend what AI coding agents can do. When you install a skill, your AI assistant automatically gains new capabilities without any prompting required.

Why This Matters

When you use AI coding assistants with Achromatic, they now follow battle-tested patterns from Vercel Engineering:

• Avoid waterfalls - Proper data fetching patterns
• Optimize bundles - Tree shaking and code splitting
• Server-side performance - Efficient RSC usage
• Accessibility compliance - WCAG best practices
• One-click deploys - Deploy directly from your AI agent

Available Skills

React Best Practices

The react-best-practices skill encodes 40+ optimization rules across 8 categories:

When your AI assistant writes code, it automatically applies these rules.

Web Design Guidelines

The web-design-guidelines skill audits UI code against 100+ best practice rules:

• Accessibility - ARIA attributes, semantic HTML, screen reader support
• Focus states - Keyboard navigation, visible focus indicators
• Forms - Label associations, validation patterns, error states
• Animation - Respecting reduced motion preferences
• Typography - Readability, responsive text sizing
• Images - Alt text, lazy loading, responsive images
• Performance - Layout shifts, render blocking resources
• Internationalization - RTL support, locale handling

Vercel Deploy Claimable

The vercel-deploy-claimable skill enables instant deployments:

• Auto-detects 40+ frameworks from your package.json
• Creates preview deployments with shareable URLs
• Generates "claimable" links for transferring projects to any Vercel account

Ask your AI assistant "deploy this to Vercel" and it handles everything.

Installation

Add agent skills to your Achromatic project:

npx add-skill vercel-labs/agent-skills

This installs all three skills. Your AI coding agent will automatically discover and use them.

Using Skills with Achromatic

Once installed, skills work automatically. Here are some examples:

Optimizing a component:

"Review this component for performance issues"
→ AI applies react-best-practices rules
→ Suggests memo, proper key usage, data fetching improvements

Checking accessibility:

"Audit the settings page for accessibility"
→ AI applies web-design-guidelines rules
→ Reports missing labels, focus issues, ARIA problems

Deploying changes:

"Deploy the current branch to preview"
→ AI runs vercel-deploy-claimable script
→ Returns preview URL and claimable link

Compatible AI Agents

Agent Skills work with all major AI coding assistants:

• Claude Code - Anthropic's CLI coding agent
• Cursor - AI-powered code editor
• Codex - OpenAI's coding model
• Opencode - Open-source coding agent
• Windsurf - Codeium's AI IDE

Why Achromatic + Agent Skills

Achromatic already follows best practices, but agent skills take it further:

1. Consistent patterns - AI suggestions match Achromatic's architecture
2. Faster iteration - Skip the back-and-forth about code style
3. Better code review - AI catches issues before they ship
4. Easy deploys - Ship previews without leaving your editor

Getting Started

1. Clone your Achromatic starter kit
2. Install agent skills:

   npx add-skill vercel-labs/agent-skills

3. Open in your AI-powered editor (Cursor, VS Code with Claude, etc.)
4. Start building with AI that understands React and Next.js best practices

Agent Skills represent the next evolution of AI-assisted development. Combined with Achromatic's production-ready foundation, you get the best of both worlds: clean architecture and AI that knows how to keep it that way.

Check out vercel-labs/agent-skills on GitHub for the full documentation.

Sources:

• vercel-labs/agent-skills on GitHub
• Vercel Releases Agent Skills - MarkTechPost
• AI SDK 6 - Vercel