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Skills are reusable instruction files an AI coding agent loads by name. They work in Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode alike. The boxd installer offers one skill for your laptop, boxd-cli. It teaches the agent how to drive the boxd CLI. The agent loads a skill automatically whenever you ask it for something the skill covers, so there is no slash command to remember.

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What it covers

With boxd-cli loaded, the agent knows how to:
  • Create, fork, and delete machines, and pick the right lifecycle verb (stop, pause, hibernate).
  • Run commands in machines with machine exec, stream long output, and move files with machine cp.
  • Publish ports as HTTPS subdomain proxies or raw port forwards.
  • Manage snapshots, checkpoints, env vars and secrets, orgs, and API keys.
  • Delegate work to agents running inside a machine and follow up on their sessions.
It also carries the sharp edges an agent would otherwise trip over: stdin handling in exec, the idle timer that watches network traffic and can put a CPU-only job to sleep, and the per-command JSON schemas for parsing --json output.

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Install

The skill ships with the boxd CLI. One installer drops the binary and the skill:
What lands on disk:
  • ~/.claude/skills/boxd-cli/SKILL.md.
  • Symlinks to the same skill in ${CODEX_HOME:-~/.codex}/skills and ~/.config/opencode/skills, when Codex or OpenCode is installed, so ~/.claude/skills/ stays the single source of truth.
Re-run the installer any time to upgrade. It updates the skill together with the binary, and the binary upgrade is idempotent, so this works even if only a skill changed.

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Manual install

If you don’t want to run the CLI installer, fetch only the boxd-cli skill:
Using Codex or OpenCode? Symlink the same directory so they pick it up too, which is what the CLI installer does:
Restart your agent and the skill is active. In Claude Code, /skills refreshes it without a restart.

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Inside a machine

Every machine comes with three skills pre-installed: boxd, run-automations, and boxd-desktop. The boxd skill is the in-machine counterpart of boxd-cli. It teaches the agent working inside a machine to drive the in-machine CLI: fork the current machine, manage its proxies, and run commands in other machines. On a private machine the in-machine CLI acts as the machine’s owner, fenced to that organization, so the skill needs no key and no configuration. On a shared machine it acts for the organization’s shared machines only. An isolated machine has neither the in-machine CLI nor the boxd skill. The skills work for all three coding agents pre-installed on every machine. They live at ~/.claude/skills/ for Claude Code and are symlinked into Codex’s and OpenCode’s skill directories, the same way the laptop installer does it.