Use documentation skill

This guide shows you how to use the Tenzir documentation as an Agent Skill. You’ll learn how to download the skill artifact, understand its structure, and configure it with your AI agent.

What is an Agent Skill?

Agent Skills is an open specification for packaging knowledge that AI agents can use. Skills provide structured documentation with progressive disclosure, letting agents load a condensed overview first and drill into details only when needed.

Tenzir publishes its documentation as an Agent Skill with each release. This gives any skill-compatible agent immediate access to deployment guides, TQL reference, operator documentation, and integration examples.

Comparison with other options

Integration	Best for	Setup complexity
Agent Skills	Portable documentation for any agent	Low
MCP Server	Live pipeline execution and tool calling	Medium
Claude Plugins	Deep Claude Code integration with workflows	Low

Use the Agent Skill when your agent supports the specification but lacks MCP support, or when you want documentation without executing pipelines.

Download the skill

Download tenzir-skill.tar.gz from the latest release:

curl -LO https://github.com/tenzir/docs/releases/latest/download/tenzir-skill.tar.gz
tar xzf tenzir-skill.tar.gz

This extracts a tenzir/ directory with the skill contents.

Skill structure

The skill uses progressive disclosure to optimize context usage:

tenzir/
├── SKILL.md        # Condensed sitemap with excerpts (~8,500 tokens)
└── references/     # Full documentation hierarchy

SKILL.md contains a navigable overview with:

• Section descriptions (Guides, Tutorials, Explanations, Reference, Integrations)
• Category headings with brief descriptions
• Links to full documentation in references/

references/ mirrors the documentation site structure, containing the complete content of every page. Your agent can follow links from SKILL.md to load specific pages as needed.

Every release is validated in CI using skills-ref to ensure the skill conforms to the Agent Skills specification.

Configure your agent

Configuration varies by agent. See the Agent Skills integration guide for detailed instructions on adding skills to different AI agents.

The general approach is:

1. Point your agent to the tenzir/ directory as a skill source
2. The agent reads SKILL.md first for an overview
3. When the agent needs details, it follows links into references/

Example: Claude Code custom instructions

Add the skill path to your project’s CLAUDE.md:

## Available skills

Load the Tenzir documentation skill from `path/to/tenzir/SKILL.md` when
answering questions about TQL, operators, or Tenzir deployment.

Example: Generic skill loading

If your agent supports the Agent Skills specification, configure it to load from the extracted directory:

skill_path: ./tenzir

Next steps

• Install the MCP server for live pipeline execution
• Use Claude plugins for deep Claude Code integration
• Generate a parser using AI assistance