SkillsJars

Agent Skills on Maven Central

Using SkillsJars

SkillsJars are Agent Skills packaged as JARs on Maven Central. They can be used with AI code assistants, custom agents, and frameworks like Spring AI. Managing Agent Skills as packaged dependencies enables versioning, grouping as transitive dependencies, and avoiding copy & pasting files.

Security Warning

Agent Skills can be dangerous / do malicous things and should be vetted before use. While SkillsJars does a basic security scan of the Skills before they are published, it is not a substitute for proper security reviews.

AI Code Assistants

Most AI code assistants expect Agent Skills as files on the filesystem. The SkillsJars build plugins extract skills from your project dependencies into a directory your assistant can read.

1. Add the extraction plugin

Gradle:

plugins {
    id("com.skillsjars.gradle-plugin") version "0.0.2"
}

Maven:

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>com.skillsjars</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>0.0.3</version>
            <dependencies>
                <!-- Your SkillsJars -->
                <dependency>
                    <groupId>com.skillsjars</groupId>
                    <artifactId>SKILLJAR_ARTIFACT_ID</artifactId>
                    <version>SKILLJAR_VERSION</version>
                </dependency>
            </dependencies>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

2. Add SkillsJar dependencies

Browse Agent Skills on SkillsJars.com and add them to your project using the dependency snippet for your build tool.

3. Extract skills

Run the extraction command, specifying the directory your AI assistant expects:

# Gradle
./gradlew extractSkillsJars -Pdir=.kiro/skills

# Maven
./mvnw skillsjars:extract -Ddir=.kiro/skills

Replace .kiro/skills with the path your AI assistant uses for skills.

Tip: AGENTS.md

Your project's AGENTS.md can instruct AI agents to run the extraction command before working with the project. This way, skills are always available without manual setup.

Custom Agents

Spring AI

The Spring AI Agent Utils project provides a SkillsTool that integrates Agent Skills directly with Spring AI agents. SkillsJars work out of the box — skills are read directly from the classpath with no extraction step needed.

1. Add dependencies

Add the Spring AI Agent Utils library and any SkillsJar dependencies to your project:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springaicommunity</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-ai-agent-utils</artifactId>
    <version>0.5.0</version>
</dependency>

<!-- SkillsJar dependencies, for example -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.skillsjars</groupId>
    <artifactId>browser-use__browser-use__browser-use</artifactId>
    <version>2026_02_23-1d154e1</version>
</dependency>

2. Configure the skills path

In application.properties, point to the classpath location where SkillsJars store their skills:

agent.skills.paths=classpath:/META-INF/skills

3. Wire up the SkillsTool

Use the SkillsTool builder to load skills and add them to your ChatClient:

@Value("${agent.skills.paths}") List<Resource> skillPaths;

ChatClient chatClient = chatClientBuilder
        .defaultToolCallbacks(
                SkillsTool.builder().addSkillsResources(skillPaths).build()
        )
        .build();

Example project

See the skillsjars-example-spring-ai repository for a complete working example.

Reading SkillsJars Directly

Custom agents on the JVM can read skills directly from SkillsJar dependencies on the classpath. Skills are located at a well-known path inside the JAR:

META-INF/skills/<org>/<repo>/<skill>/SKILL.md

Each SKILL.md follows the Agent Skills specification with YAML front-matter containing the skill name, description, and other metadata. Additional files referenced by the skill are included alongside the SKILL.md.

Creating SkillsJars

You can package your own Agent Skills as SkillsJars and publish them to Maven Central via SkillsJars.com.

1. Create a skills directory

Add a skills directory to your project root. Each subdirectory is a skill and must contain a SKILL.md marker file following the Agent Skills specification.

skills/
├── my-skill/
│   ├── SKILL.md
│   └── helpers.py
└── another-skill/
    └── SKILL.md

2. Add the Maven plugin

Add the SkillsJars Maven plugin with the package goal:

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>com.skillsjars</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>0.0.5</version>
            <executions>
                <execution>
                    <goals>
                        <goal>package</goal>
                    </goals>
                </execution>
            </executions>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

3. Build the JAR

The plugin runs during mvn package and places skills into META-INF/skills/ inside your JAR. If your project has GitHub SCM configured in the POM, it uses the org/repo from the URL. Otherwise it uses the project's groupId.

mvn package

4. Publish to Maven Central

Push your skills to a public GitHub repository and use the Publish a SkillsJar form on the homepage to deploy them to Maven Central.

Tip: Custom skills directory

By default the plugin looks for skills in skills/ at the project root. You can customize this with the skillsDir configuration parameter.