Essential Skills that Everyone Should Install in Their Agents

There are a lot of skills, but not all of them are considered essential — which must be installed whenever an agent runs. I would like to keep this blog entry as a reference for all essential skills that everyone should install in their agents, such as Codex and Pi Coding Agent that I am using.

Commit, Pull, and Push

I prefer to have dedicated skills for routine git operations: commit, pull, and push. I am currently using the skills from the OpenAI Symphony GitHub repository. The push skill requires .github/pull_request_template.md to be present in the current project, which is recommended anyway.

Context7

This is essential for any development tasks, agents use it all the time for the latest library references. The skill and prompt for the agents to use Context7 can be installed using two commands in Codex:

bun install -g ctx7@latest

and then:

ctx7 setup --codex

This will install a skill called find-docs in the ~/.agents/skills directory, as well as a prompt in ./.codex/AGENTS.md.

To install Context7 in Pi, it’s best to follow the official documentation and install an extension:

pi install npm:@upstash/context7-pi

Of course, make sure export CONTEXT7_API_KEY=ctx7sk_... is included in .zshrc.

Oracle

Extremely useful for Codex or Pi to consult with GPT 5.5 Pro using browser integration. To install:

bun install -g @steipete/oracle

Then create the file ~/.oracle/config.json with the following:

{
  model: "gpt-5.5-pro",
  engine: "browser",
  filesReport: true,
  browser: {
    manualLogin: true,
    keepBrowser: true,
    chatgptUrl: "URL-to-ChatGPT-Project"
  }
}

Finally, copy the Oracle skill into ~/.agents/skills.