skills

Use skills commands to keep a project's Prisma agent skills current. An agent skill is a directory with a SKILL.md: instructions that teach an AI coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Devin) how to use a library. Skills ship inside the Prisma npm packages your project installs, so they always describe the version in use. skills sync copies them into the directories the agent harnesses read.

Usage

bunx prisma@latest skills sync

Run init once to add a postinstall hook that reruns the sync on every install and upgrade.

Commands

skills sync takes:

Where skills come from

Sync resolves a fixed allowlist of Prisma packages by name, from the project root and each workspace member:

• @prisma/orm-postgres
• @prisma/orm-sqlite
• @prisma/orm-mongo
• @prisma/composer
• prisma itself, which ships the prisma-platform-core-concepts skill

It never scans node_modules for skills. A skill is instructions an agent will follow, so installing one from an arbitrary transitive dependency would hand that dependency's author influence over your agent. Only packages you deliberately installed are sources. If two workspace members pin different versions of one package, the highest version wins and sync warns.

Where skills go

Sync writes one copy per configured agent harness:

Without configuration, sync writes every directory, so a harness you adopt later finds the skills already there. Narrow the set with skills: { agents: [...] } in prisma.config.ts; see Configuration. The copies are ordinary files that git tracks: commit them so agents have the skills on a fresh clone.

Each copy carries the source package's version in its SKILL.md frontmatter. Sync compares that stamp against the installed package and re-copies on mismatch, and removes copies whose source package is no longer installed or whose agent is no longer named in skills.agents; agents: [] removes them all. A directory sync does not own, such as a hand-written skill whose name collides, is left intact and reported as refused. Sync does nothing, and exits 0, when everything is already current.

The staleness check

After a package upgrade that nobody follows with a sync, every prisma command appends one line to stderr:

Prisma agent skills are out of date (installed @prisma/orm-postgres 8.1.0, synced 8.0.0). Run: prisma skills sync

The notice never changes the exit code and never writes to stdout. It is not conditioned on a TTY: agents run without one, and they are who it is for. It is suppressed by any of:

1. prisma skills sync --disable (persistent, per project).
2. skills: { check: false } in prisma.config.ts.
3. The PRISMA_SKILLS_CHECK=0 environment variable.
4. A CI or GITHUB_ACTIONS environment variable.
5. The --quiet, --json, --format json, or --version flags on the current invocation.
6. Running a skills or init command itself.