Skills & Guidelines

AI guidelines and 200+ skills from skills.boxlang.io — on-demand knowledge for your coding agents.

ColdBox's AI integration splits agent knowledge into two complementary pieces: guidelines (always-relevant conventions) and skills (on-demand task cookbooks). Both live in your project's .agents/ directory.

Guidelines

Guidelines teach agents framework conventions and architectural patterns. Three core guidelines ship with the CLI:

Guideline

Covers

coldbox

ColdBox architecture, handlers, routing, DI, conventions

boxlang

BoxLang syntax, classes, lambdas, BIFs

cfml

CFML fundamentals for Adobe/Lucee projects

Module-provided guidelines are auto-discovered: install qb or cbsecurity and their guidelines appear in .agents/guidelines/modules/ after coldbox ai refresh.

coldbox ai guidelines list --verbose    # What's installed
coldbox ai guidelines add qb cbsecurity # Add specific guidelines
coldbox ai guidelines override coldbox  # Customize a core guideline locally

Skills

Skills are step-by-step implementation cookbooks sourced from the central registry at skills.boxlang.io — 200+ skills covering ColdBox, BoxLang, CommandBox, TestBox, and the module ecosystem.

Unlike guidelines, skills are inventoried, not loaded: your agent sees a catalog of skill names and descriptions, and reads a skill's SKILL.md only when the task calls for it. That keeps base context lean while deep knowledge stays one read_file away.

coldbox ai skills list --verbose   # Browse installed skills
coldbox ai skills find <term>      # Search the registry
coldbox ai skills install <slug>   # Install from the registry
coldbox ai skills refresh          # Sync with installed modules

Examples of what agents can pull on demand: building CRUD handlers, REST APIs, integration tests, scheduled tasks, migrations, validation constraints, and BoxLang runtime deployment recipes.

For Module Authors

Bundle AI resources in your own module by adding .agents/guidelines/ and .agents/skills/ to it — the CLI auto-discovers them for every consumer of your module. Scaffold them with:

coldbox create module myModule --ai

Full authoring workflow: Agentic ColdBox.

Guidelines

Skills

For Module Authors

See Also