Agent Skills in WordPress Studio

Agent Skills give your AI coding agent specialized knowledge about WordPress development. Studio bundles a set of skills you can install into your sites so agents like Claude Code or Cursor pick them up automatically.

What are Agent Skills?

An Agent Skill is a SKILL.md file that tells the agent how to approach a specific area of WordPress development. When a skill is installed in a site, the agent reads it and applies the guidance it contains before starting work.

You can use skills to help agents handle tasks like:

• Building a custom block with the correct block.json structure
• Creating a plugin that follows WordPress coding standards and security practices
• Working with REST API routes and authentication

Available skills in Studio

Studio ships with the following built-in skills:

• Studio CLI: WordPress development workflows using Studio CLI
• Plugin Development: Hooks, settings API, security, and packaging
• Block Development: Block.json, attributes, rendering, and deprecations
• Block Themes: Theme.json, templates, patterns, and style variations
• REST API — Routes, endpoints, schema, and authentication
• WP-CLI & Ops — CLI commands, automation, and search-replace

Where skills are stored

When a skill is installed, Studio copies it into the site directory:

For agents that use Claude’s directory layout, Studio also creates a symlink at .claude/skills/<skill-id> pointing to the same location. No additional configuration is needed for Claude Code to pick up the skill.

Installing and removing skills in Studio

There are two ways to manage skills in Studio – globally and per site.

You can find the global settings for skills in Settings → Skills. Open Settings from the bottom of the sidebar, or press ⌘, (Ctrl+, on Windows and Linux), and select the Skills page:

From that screen you can:

• Turn on WordPress skills to install every available skill at once
• Turn on the toggle next to an individual skill to install it
• Turn off the toggle next to an installed skill to uninstall it

To manage skills for a single site, open that site’s settings (choose Settings from the site menu) and select the Skills page, or click Manage skills for this site in Settings → Skills. Turn WordPress skills on or off for the site, and use the menu next to each installed skill to open it or Uninstall it. Changes there apply only to that site, and turning skills off keeps their files and any edits you made to them.