oquidave/production-ready-agent-skills

Slides and live-demo skill from "Designing Production-Ready Skills for AI Agents" — talk at Africa's Talking East Africa Hub, Kampala (2026-05-07). Includes a working Africa's Talking SMS skill in Claude Code skill format. # Production-Ready Agent Skills Slides and a working demo skill from the talk *"Designing Production-Ready Skills for AI Agents"* — given at the **Africa's Talking East Africa Hub** in Kampala on 2026-05-07. Event page. If you weren't there: this repo is a self-contained introduction to the **agent skill** format — what it is, why it matters, and what makes a skill production-grade — anchored to a concrete working example: a Claude Code skill that sends real SMS via the Africa's Talking bulk SMS API. ## What's an agent skill? In plain terms, an agent skill is a how-to guide written for an AI agent. Instead of teaching *you* how to do something, it teaches the *agent* how. A skill is just a folder with a `SKILL.md` (the instructions, plus YAML frontmatter that tells the agent *when* to use it) and optionally a few scripts the agent can run. The format is open and works across many agents — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, and others. See agentskills.io for the spec. ## What's in this repo | Path | What | |---|---| | `slides.md` | Marp-flavored markdown source of the talk deck | | `slides.pptx` | PowerPoint export — open in PowerPoint / Keynote / Google Slides / LibreOffice | | `slides.pdf` | PDF export — backup viewing format | | `demo-skill/africastalking-sms/` | A working Claude Code skill that sends SMS via Africa's Talking | ## The demo skill: `africastalking-sms` The `demo-skill/africastalking-sms/` folder is a complete skill you can install and use today. It: - Sends one or more SMS messages via Africa's Talking's bulk SMS API - Reads credentials from environment variables — never embeds them in the skill files - Uses Python's standard library only — no `requests`, no SDK, no install step beyond Python 3 - Returns structured JSON (per-recipient status code, cost, message ID) - Errors out clearly when credentials or sender ID are missing ### Install ```bash # User-level: available across all your projects on this machine mkdir -p ~/. …