epic: Agent Skills — built-in operational skills, authoring guide, registry distribution

Agent Skills roadmap

This issue tracks the remaining work for redisctl MCP Agent Skills. The runtime and initial catalog are now shipped; the backlog below focuses on gaps rather than the original design questions.

Current state (2026-08-11)

redisctl MCP includes a runtime skill loader with:

• bundled skills in crates/redisctl-mcp/skills/
• an optional --skills-dir
• the REDISCTL_MCP_SKILLS_DIR environment override
• bundled fallback behavior for packaged installations

The current built-in catalog contains 10 skills:

• cloud-database-provisioning
• enterprise-health-check
• data-explorer
• data-modeling-advisor
• compare-approaches
• index-advisor
• index-audit
• index-migration
• index-ab-test
• query-tuning

Completed

• Choose and ship the repository layout for bundled skills
• Implement runtime discovery and loading
• Package bundled skills with the MCP server
• Add Enterprise health-check guidance
• Add Cloud database-provisioning guidance
• Add the initial Redis data, indexing, and query-tuning catalog
• Validate bundled skill metadata and referenced MCP tool names (#1096)

Remaining skill coverage

Enterprise

• Capacity planning
• Cluster troubleshooting
• Database performance analysis

Cloud

• Migration planning

Add new skills only where a repeatable, multi-tool workflow is clearer and safer than an MCP tool description or prompt.

Remaining platform and documentation work

• Add a skill-authoring guide with the supported frontmatter and tool-reference conventions
• Document discovery, overrides, and installation for users
• Decide whether an external registry/distribution mechanism is needed
• Keep the catalog synchronized with user-facing documentation

MCP prompts remain complementary: prompts provide interactive starting points, while skills describe reusable workflows that clients and agents can discover.

Start by reviewing the bundled skills under crates/redisctl-mcp/skills/ and the existing --skills-dir and REDISCTL_MCP_SKILLS_DIR behavior. The roadmap covers new enterprise and cloud skills, an authoring guide, user-facing discovery and installation documentation, and a possible registry, so completion requires resolving which remaining item to undertake and updating the catalog documentation accordingly.