AI Skills

The Azure lexicon ships several AI skills that teach AI coding agents how to build, validate, and deploy Azure Resource Manager 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 azure, the skills are installed to skills/ for automatic agent discovery.

To refresh skills after a lexicon update:

chant update

Skill: chant-azure

The chant-azure skill covers the full Azure ARM deployment lifecycle:

Build — chant build src/ --output template.json
Validate — chant lint src/ + az deployment group validate
Deploy — az deployment group create with parameters
Update — incremental or complete deployment modes
Delete — az deployment group delete / az group delete
Status — az deployment group show and operation details
Troubleshooting — deployment operation inspection, error resolution

Skill: chant-azure-security

The chant-azure-security skill covers security best practices for Azure ARM templates:

Identity & Access — managed identities, RBAC role assignments, least-privilege
Network Security — NSG rules, private endpoints, service endpoints
Encryption — storage encryption, disk encryption, TLS enforcement
Monitoring — diagnostic settings, log analytics, alerts
Post-synth checks — maps to lint rules AZR016–AZR029

Skill: chant-azure-patterns

The chant-azure-patterns skill covers advanced ARM template patterns:

Linked Templates — nested and linked template deployments
Conditional Resources — conditional provisioning patterns
Cross-resource References — reference() and resourceId() usage
Tagging Strategies — consistent tagging across resources
Multi-region — deploying across Azure regions
Composites — high-level reusable resource groupings

Skill: chant-azure-aks

The chant-azure-aks skill bridges the Azure and Kubernetes lexicons for end-to-end AKS workflows:

AKS Cluster — provisioning clusters with managed identities and RBAC
ACR Integration — Azure Container Registry attached to AKS
Workload Identity — federated identity credentials for pods
AGIC Ingress — Application Gateway Ingress Controller setup
Observability — monitoring, logging, and alerting for AKS workloads

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