InstaCloud Skills

The insta agent skill: what a coding agent needs to know to run cloud infrastructure through InstaCloud — provisioning services, deploying apps, forking a whole environment per branch, wiring credentials into an app, passing governance approvals, and giving several agents a sandbox each.

Skills are Markdown following the Agent Skills format, so they work in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Copilot, Gemini CLI, Windsurf and anything else that reads a skills/ directory.

Install

The insta CLI installs this skill for you:

insta setup agent

That copies the skill user-globally for every coding agent on the machine and registers the InstaCloud MCP server. insta project create and insta project link additionally install the stack skills a project needs (Neon Postgres, Tigris, Better Auth) into the project itself, along with the insta observe credential-audit hook — see governance.md.

To install the skill on its own:

npx skills add InsForge/insta-skills -s insta

Or copy it into your agent's skills directory:

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r insta ~/.claude/skills/insta

What's inside

insta/
├── SKILL.md              entry point: the model, setup, the two non-negotiables, governance
├── cli-reference.md      every command, with flags, approval gates and plan limits
└── references/
    ├── setup.md          CLI install, auth, a first project and its services
    ├── deploy.md         source and image deploys, ports, custom domains
    ├── frameworks.md     deploy recipes per framework
    ├── branching.md      branch environments and the data that comes with them
    ├── governance.md     approvals, policy, the credential audit
    ├── operate.md        status, triage and recovery
    └── mcp.md            the remote insta-cloud MCP server

SKILL.md is what the agent loads first; it routes to a reference when a task needs the detail. cli-reference.md is the canonical description of the CLI surface — the insta-cli repo links here for flags rather than keeping a second copy, and a command or flag change there is not finished until it lands here.

Environments

InstaCloud runs two separate deployments, and each gets its own branch of this repository:

Environment	Skill source
prod	InsForge/insta-skills (main)
staging	InsForge/insta-skills#devel

insta setup agent picks the right one from the machine's current environment, so a staging install reads skill text that describes the staging control plane.

Use the #ref form when pinning a branch by hand. owner/repo@ref looks equivalent, but the skills tool parses @ as a skill-name filter and silently leaves you on the default branch — while still echoing the ref back in its progress output, so it reads as though it worked.

Authoring

• Reference the insta CLI, not provider APIs. Skills say which insta command to run. Provider-specific knowledge belongs behind the CLI and the control plane.
• One skill, one capability. Split large topics by task.
• Include failure modes. A skill earns its keep by teaching what goes wrong and how to recover.
• Keep examples runnable. Agents execute the code blocks.

A skill is a SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter:

---
name: <skill-name>
description: <one line; the agent uses this to decide whether to load the skill>
---

# <title>

<instructions, examples, failure modes, the `insta` commands to run>

License

Apache 2.0. See LICENSE.