AI Skills

The AWS lexicon ships an AI skill called chant-aws that teaches AI coding agents (like Claude Code) how to build, validate, and deploy CloudFormation templates from a chant project.

What are skills?

Skills are structured markdown documents bundled with a lexicon. When an AI agent works in a chant project, it discovers and loads relevant skills automatically — giving it operational knowledge about the deployment workflow without requiring the user to explain each step.

Installation

When you scaffold a new project with chant init --lexicon aws, the skill is installed to skills/chant-aws/SKILL.md for automatic discovery by Claude Code.

For existing projects, create the file manually:

.claude/
  skills/
    chant-aws/
      SKILL.md    # skill content (see below)

Skill: chant-aws

The chant-aws skill covers the full deployment lifecycle:

• Build — chant build src/ --output stack.json
• Validate — chant lint src/ + aws cloudformation validate-template
• Deploy — aws cloudformation deploy with capabilities
• Update — change sets for preview, or direct deploy
• Delete — aws cloudformation delete-stack
• Status — describe-stacks and describe-stack-events
• Troubleshooting — event inspection, rollback recovery, drift detection

The skill is invocable as a slash command: /chant-aws

MCP integration

The lexicon also provides MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools and resources that AI agents can use programmatically:

MCP tool	Description
build	Build the chant project
lint	Run lint rules
explain	Summarize project resources
scaffold	Generate starter files
search	Search available resource types
aws:diff	Compare current build output against previous

MCP resource	Description
resource-catalog	JSON list of all supported CloudFormation resource types
examples/basic-stack	Example stack with S3 bucket and IAM role