Skills

Using the skills

The nine skills that ship with the CLI — what they are, how to install them, and how an agent picks one up.

A skill is a Markdown file an agent reads before it touches the platform. It carries the part a --help page cannot: when to reach for a command at all, and what the objects mean once you have.

abx ships nine of them. They are not documentation about the product — they are the vocabulary the platform hands an agent, which is why this site renders them here: what you read on these pages is the file the installer writes to ~/.agents/skills, generated from that same file at build time.

Install

The skills arrive with the CLI. There is nothing to install separately.

abx's installer writes the binary to ~/.local/bin and the nine skills to ~/.agents/skills:

curl -fsSL https://oss-ap-southeast.scitix.ai/scitix/packages/agentbox/cli/latest/install.sh | sh

Both paths are overridable, which is what an image build wants:

AGBX_BIN_DIR=/usr/local/bin AGBX_SKILL_DIR=/opt/skills sh install.sh

The plugin installs the skills and keeps the API key in the OS keychain, where the agent never sees it:

/plugin marketplace add scitix/agent-sandbox
/plugin install agentbox

A sandbox that is meant to drive the platform itself has the same two things to do — the binary on PATH, the skills somewhere readable. /opt/skills is the predictable place, and any harness told to read that directory will find them:

RUN curl -fsSL https://oss-ap-southeast.scitix.ai/scitix/packages/agentbox/cli/latest/install.sh \
      | AGBX_BIN_DIR=/usr/local/bin AGBX_SKILL_DIR=/opt/skills sh

The nine

SkillRead it when
abx-commonreaching a platform at all: the endpoint, the key, which cluster, and what happens to a write that needs a person's approval. Every other skill defers here.
abx-resource-capacitysizing: how many sandboxes fit, why a pool will not grow, how autoscaling and quota interact.
abx-observesomething is failing or slow — events, pool status, sandbox logs, metrics.
abx-harbor-frameworkrunning a benchmark suite (Terminal-Bench, SWE-bench, a custom dataset) against pre-warmed pools.
abx-reinforcement-learningrollouts for training: concurrency, environment resets, collecting trajectories.
abx-managed-agentgiving your own agent a sandbox for its file and shell tools, durably across restarts.
abx-sandbox-dockerthe workload needs Docker inside the sandbox.
abx-sandbox-networkcutting a sandbox off the network, or allowing exactly one host.
abx-sandbox-secretsa sandbox needs a credential it must not be able to read.

How an agent uses them

A skill describes a task; the tool it reaches for is the CLI, whose shape is one document:

abx agent-context        # every resource, filter, column and write body, as JSON

Two habits are worth engineering into whatever agent you run, and both are in abx-common: have it read that document once rather than guessing at commands, and have it read the environment's own documentation (abx envs YOUR_ENV docs --cluster YOUR_CLUSTER) rather than carrying endpoints in its prompt.

Give an agent an agent-mode key (section 6 of the CLI guide), never an unrestricted one: the platform's writes then wait for your approval, and sandbox work is unaffected.

See also

  • CLI guide — installing abx itself, and using it from an agent
  • E2B SDK guide — the sandbox half these skills assume

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