AI Skills

The GitHub Actions lexicon ships AI skills that teach AI coding agents (like Claude Code) how to build, validate, and deploy GitHub Actions workflows 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 github, skills are installed to .claude/skills/ for automatic discovery by Claude Code.

For existing projects, create the files manually:

.claude/
  skills/
    chant-github/
      SKILL.md    # skill content

Skill: chant-github

The inline chant-github skill covers the full workflow lifecycle:

• Build — chant build src/ --output .github/workflows/ci.yml
• Validate — chant lint src/
• Deploy — commit and push the generated YAML
• Status — GitHub Actions UI or gh run list
• Troubleshooting — lint rule codes (GHA001–GHA020), post-synth checks (GHA006–GHA058)

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

Skill: github-actions-patterns

A file-based skill loaded from src/skills/github-actions-patterns.md. It provides pattern knowledge for:

• Workflow structure — name, on, permissions, jobs
• Trigger patterns — push, pull_request, schedule, workflow_dispatch
• Matrix strategy — multi-OS, multi-version builds
• Caching — SetupNode cache option, CacheAction composite
• Permissions — least-privilege patterns
• Reusable workflows — ReusableWorkflowCallJob
• Artifacts — upload/download between jobs
• Concurrency — group + cancel-in-progress

MCP integration

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

MCP tool	Description
diff	Compare current build output against previous output
github:checks	Build the workflow and return its security findings (the GHA checks)
github:workflow	Triggers and jobs as written — name, run order, step count
github:references	Actions and images pulled in, and whether each is pinned to a commit SHA
github:affected	Given a job, the jobs that would re-run because they depend on it
github:workflow-yaml	The generated workflow YAML

The github:* tools are read-only context tools (#327): each builds from your source and returns what chant already computes — before the workflow runs or merges. None touch the live GitHub instance, run history, or write anything.

MCP resource	Description
resource-catalog	JSON list of all supported GitHub Actions entity types
examples/basic-ci	Example CI workflow with TypeScript source