Drive sluice from an AI agent

sluice ships task-scoped agent skills — plain-markdown playbooks that let Claude Code, Cursor, or any skill-aware assistant run a migration, verify a sync, or operate a backup chain on your behalf, inside the same safety gate.

sluice ships a set of agent skills: task-scoped operator playbooks that let an AI coding agent — Claude Code, Cursor, or anything that follows the open agent-skills convention — drive the sluice CLI for one concrete job. Each skill is a plain SKILL.md file: no plugins, nothing agent-specific, versioned in the source repo alongside the CLI it drives. They live under skills/ in the repository.

Why sluice ships them #

sluice already exposes a machine-readable surface built for assistants: an AGENTS.md command taxonomy, an llms.txt docs index, per-command --format json envelopes, stable SLUICE-E-* error codes, and a documented exit taxonomy. A skill sits on top of that surface. It does not re-document the CLI — it references those canonical sources and encodes the decision tree for a single task: what to run, how to read the result back, what to report, and where a human must approve before anything changes. One skill, one task, one go/no-go.

The catalog #

Nine skills ship today, in two tiers.

Tier 1 — the core loop #

Skill	Use it to	Writes?
`migrate-preflight`	Assess a migrate or sync before running it → a go/no-go with the risks named.	read-only
`fidelity-verify`	Confirm a completed migrate / sync / restore is faithful → a fidelity report.	read-only
`sluice-error-triage`	Turn a `SLUICE-E-*` code + exit code into a root cause and a recovery path.	read-only
`backup-chain-operator`	Plan and operate an encrypted backup chain (full → incremental → compact → prune → restore-test).	gated

Tier 2 — operational + engine-specific #

Skill	Use it to	Writes?
`cdc-sync-operator`	Stand up and operate continuous sync (cold-start → CDC → cutover).	gated
`planetscale-migration`	Migrate or sync against PlanetScale / Vitess (VStream, reparent, ownership, metrics-watch).	gated
`fleet-operator`	Operate a `sync run` fleet — many syncs in one process.	gated
`redaction-setup`	Configure and verify PII redaction during migrate / sync.	gated
`sqlite-d1-import`	Import SQLite / Cloudflare D1 (`--stage-local`, `--infer-types`, big-int / CPU gotchas).	gated

The safety gate #

Every skill honors sluice's command taxonomy — the same gate a careful human operator uses:

Read-only commands (--dry-run, verify, schema preview / diff, sync health / status, backup verify, engines) run freely.
State-changing commands (migrate, sync start / run, backup *, restore, cutover) run only as part of an approved task.
Destructive flags (--reset-target-data, --force-cold-start, --yes, backup prune / compact without --dry-run) are never passed without explicit human approval for that specific invocation.

Every skill also follows sluice's own discipline: verify by reading state back, never trust an exit code alone, and treat status:"refused" / exit 3 as a decision point — surface error.hint and wait, don't retry the command unchanged.

Getting started #

Install the CLI. You need the sluice binary — brew install sluicesync/tap/sluice, go install sluicesync.dev/sluice/cmd/sluice@latest, or the ghcr.io/sluicesync/sluice container (see Getting started).
Install the skills. Run the setup script from a checkout of the repo — it detects the agents present and installs each SKILL.md into the right place:
```
./skills/install.sh
```
For Claude Code that is ~/.claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md (personal, all projects) or .claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md (checked into a project); Cursor and others have equivalents. Because the skills are just markdown, you can also copy the directories by hand.
Describe the task in natural language. The matching skill's trigger loads it automatically — "migrate this Postgres DB to PlanetScale" pulls in migrate-preflight; "why did this restore fail?" pulls in sluice-error-triage — or invoke one explicitly (/migrate-preflight).
Review the go/no-go. The skill drives the CLI on your behalf and returns a go/no-go, a report, or a gated action — and stops at the safety gate for your approval before anything writes.

Learn more #

skills/ in the repository — every SKILL.md, the catalog, and install.sh.
llms.txt and llms-full.txt — the AI-assistant docs index the skills point at.
AGENTS.md — the command taxonomy, standard workflow, JSON-envelope shape, and env-first credentials that the safety gate is built on.