Skip to main content
Skills are reusable instruction files an AI coding agent loads by name. They work in Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode alike. boxd ships one skill, boxd-cli: it teaches the agent on your laptop how to drive the boxd CLI. The agent loads it automatically whenever you ask it to do something with boxd, so there is no slash command to remember.

​
What it covers

With the skill loaded, the agent knows how to:
  • create, fork, and destroy 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 subdomains or raw TCP/UDP 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 network-idle suspend trap for CPU-only jobs, and the per-command JSON schemas for parsing --json output.

​
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 the skill changed.

​
Manual install (if you prefer)

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

​
Inside a VM

Every boxd VM image carries the in-VM counterpart, a skill named boxd, already installed with nothing to do. It teaches the agent working inside a machine to drive the in-VM CLI: fork the current VM, manage its proxies, and run commands in sibling machines. Inside a VM the CLI signs in as you automatically, so the skill needs no key and no configuration. It works for all three coding agents pre-installed on every VM: it lives at ~/.claude/skills/ for Claude Code and is symlinked into Codex’s and OpenCode’s skill directories, the same fan-out the laptop installer does.