APEX Skills - Agentic Platform Engineering eXperience

Curated platform-engineering skills that compress onboarding from months to weeks. Domain knowledge authored by senior AWS SSAs, TAMs, and ProServe, delivered through agentic AI tools (Claude Code, Kiro CLI etc).

APEX uses agentic AI (frontier models and agent harness like Claude Code) combined with curated “skills” to give engineers SSA-grade platform engineering output.

Agent Skills are organized folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that frontier LLM models can discover and load dynamically to perform specialized tasks. By codifying expert platform engineering knowledge as Agent Skills, we amplify best practices and scale them across teams while reducing toil. They follow the Agent Skills Agent Skills open standard open standard and are compatible with any supported agent harness.

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What’s in This Repo

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Quick Start

NPX Installer (recommended)

Prerequisites: Node.js 18+ and git must be installed.

npx apex-skills

Detects Claude Code and/or Kiro CLI, clones the repo to ~/.apex-skills/, and symlinks all skills + steering into the right locations.

npx apex-skills --update              # Pull latest skills
npx apex-skills --version v1.2.0      # Pin to a specific release
npx apex-skills --branch feat/new-eks # Install from a branch
npx apex-skills --help                # See all options

Manual Install

If you prefer not to use npx, clone the repo and copy skills directly.

Claude Code

git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/sample-apex-skills.git
cd sample-apex-skills

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills ~/.claude/commands
cp -r skills/* ~/.claude/skills/
ln -sfn "$(pwd)/steering/commands/apex" ~/.claude/commands/apex
ln -sfn "$(pwd)/steering" ~/.claude/apex-steering

Usage: Start a Claude Code session and use slash commands:

• /apex:eks — hub that auto-routes based on your request
• /apex:eks-design — “Help me design an EKS cluster”
• /apex:eks-upgrade-check — “Is my cluster ready to upgrade to 1.32?”

Kiro CLI

git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/sample-apex-skills.git
cd sample-apex-skills

mkdir -p ~/.kiro/skills ~/.kiro/steering
cp -r skills/* ~/.kiro/skills/
cp steering/workflows/*.md ~/.kiro/steering/

Other Agent Harnesses

Skills follow the Agent Skills standard. Each skill lives in skills/{skill-name}/ with a SKILL.md and optional references/, scripts/, and assets/ directories. Clone and point your tool at them — see skills/README.md for the layout.

Agent Rules (optional)

AGENTS.md contains project-level guardrails — verification habits, source-checking, safety boundaries. These are personal to each user’s workflow, so they are not auto-loaded by the installer. To activate them, add the contents to whatever file your agent harness reads for project instructions (e.g., CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, .cursorrules, .github/copilot-instructions.md, .kiro/steering/project.md).

Skills Reference

This table is auto-generated by misc/update-skills-references.sh. Do not edit manually.

EKS Skills

ECS Skills

General

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Steering

This table is auto-generated by misc/update-steering-references.sh. Do not edit manually.

Workflows

Slash Commands

Steering files define how the agent runs an engagement. Structured sequences with questionnaires, checkpoints, and routing. The hub (/apex:eks) detects what you want and routes to the right workflow. Slash commands (e.g., /apex:eks-design) are agent-harness entry points that trigger these workflows.

The key test: Remove all steering files and the agent still knows the right answers (skills provide knowledge). But it wouldn’t know how to run the engagement.

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Examples

This table is auto-generated by misc/update-examples-references.sh. Do not edit manually.

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Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to add skills, steering workflows, and examples.

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Disclaimer

This repository provides sample code for educational and demonstration purposes only. It is not intended for direct production use without proper review, testing, and validation. Always test generated infrastructure artifacts (Terraform, Helm charts, kubectl commands) in non-production environments first. Use at your own risk — the authors are not responsible for any issues, damages, or losses that may result from using this code in production.

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License

This project is licensed under the MIT-0 License. See the LICENSE file.