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Agent Skill for AI coding tools

marina ships an Agent Skill — a portable capability description that teaches AI coding tools like Claude Code how to drive marina. Install it once and agents know to reach for marina when a script, demo, or e2e test needs an ephemeral kind cluster — instead of fumbling with kind create cluster, Docker Desktop, or Colima.

Why a skill

An Agent Skill is a small Markdown file (SKILL.md) with a name, a description of when to use it, and worked examples. AI coding tools load it into context and follow it. Without the skill an agent has to be told, every session, how marina works and what its gotchas are; with it installed, the agent already knows to:

• prefer marina over raw kind / Docker Desktop / Rancher Desktop / Colima for local Kubernetes on a Mac;
• create a uniquely named cluster and tear it down in a trap so a failed test never leaks a cluster;
• always pass a cluster name to cluster delete — omitting it opens an interactive picker that would hang a non-interactive agent;
• load locally built test images into the cluster's nodes with kind load docker-image (there is no local push registry);
• expect marina cluster create to be synchronous, so no arbitrary sleep loops are needed after it returns.

The skill is the same knowledge captured on this docs site, distilled into the format an agent consumes directly.

Install it

The marina skill install command writes the bundled SKILL.md into your AI tool's skills directory. By default it targets Claude Code's user skills directory:

$ marina skill install
Installed marina Agent Skill → ~/.claude/skills/marina/SKILL.md
Start a new AI coding session to pick it up.

The skill definition is embedded in the marina binary, so there's nothing to download and no network call — the file written always matches the version of marina you have installed. Start a fresh agent session afterward so the tool loads the newly installed skill.

Flags

Re-running install is safe: if the skill is already present it's left untouched unless you pass --force.

$ marina skill install
Skill already installed at ~/.claude/skills/marina/SKILL.md (use --force to overwrite)
$ marina skill install --force      # refresh after upgrading marina

Other AI tools

Claude Code is the built-in target, but the skill itself is a plain Markdown file — use --print to emit it and place it wherever another tool expects its skills or context files:

$ marina skill install --print > ./marina-skill.md
$ marina skill install --print | pbcopy      # straight to the clipboard

Where it lives

To print the path marina installs to (handy for scripting or for confirming what a session will load), use marina skill path:

$ marina skill path
/Users/you/.claude/skills/marina/SKILL.md

See also

• CLI reference — every marina command and flag, including skill.
• Getting started — the manual version of the workflow the skill automates.
• SKILL.md on GitHub — read the exact skill the agent loads.