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DevHelm ships a bundle of agent skills that give Cursor, Claude Code, Claude Desktop, and other Anthropic-skill-compatible hosts first-class knowledge of the platform. After installing them, an AI agent can answer “why is my checkout monitor red?” with a real forensic trace, publish an incident update to your status page, or stand up a new notification policy — all from the chat window, in your repo context. Skills are bundled with the DevHelm CLI (devhelm) and installed with one command.

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What’s in the bundle

Each skill is self-contained and follows Anthropic’s progressive-disclosure convention — the top-level SKILL.md stays under 500 lines; resource-specific detail lives in references/ files that the agent loads on demand.

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60-second install

1

Grab your API key

Copy an API key from Settings → API Keys — a starter key named Default is created for you during onboarding; you can create additional ones or rotate them anytime. All API keys start with dh_live_ and have full access to the organization.
2

Install the CLI

3

Install skills for your agent

This auto-detects Cursor, Claude Code, and other MCP-compatible hosts installed on your machine and copies the skill bundle into the right place. To target a specific host, pass --target cursor | claude-code | codex | windsurf | gemini | generic | all.For Claude Desktop, which ships skills as uploaded bundles:
Then import the zip from Claude Desktop → Settings → Skills → Add skill.
4

Authenticate

Export your key so the CLI — invoked by the skill — can call the API:
Or, if you prefer a local context file:
5

Verify

Open a chat in your agent and ask:
“Use the devhelm-investigate skill to list my monitors and their status.”
You should see the agent read @references/check-results.md, run devhelm monitors list, and return a structured summary. If it can’t find the skill, run devhelm skills doctor to diagnose.

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Skills vs MCP server — which to use?

DevHelm offers two AI integrations. They’re complementary, not exclusive. Run both together if you like. The skills know about the MCP server and will defer to it for pure read paths when it’s installed.

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Safety rails baked in

Every skill enforces the same guarantees:
  • Never print API key values into chat output, commits, or logs.
  • Never publish a status-page incident update without explicit, single-turn confirmation.
  • Never edit devhelm.yml without showing the diff first.
  • Always prefer plan / dry-run before any deploy or apply.
See the skill source in the skill repo for the full list.

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Next

Configure each host

Cursor, Claude Code, Claude Desktop — the exact install paths, env vars, and verification steps.

Example prompts

Copy-paste prompts that hit each of the four skills end-to-end.