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How to Use Agent Skills with Amazon Q Developer and Kiro

How to Use Agent Skills with Amazon Q Developer and Kiro

Learn how to use Anthropic's Agent Skills with Amazon Q Developer and Kiro through MCP server integration for cross-platform AI agent compatibility.

What are Agent Skills?

 Agent Skills  is a context governance reference practice developed by Anthropic, designed to provide progressive knowledge disclosure for AI agents. This approach allows agents to access specialized knowledge and capabilities in a structured, organized manner.
However, Agent Skills were originally designed for Anthropic's Claude and can't be directly used by other AI agents like Amazon Q Developer and Kiro. This limitation creates a barrier for teams wanting to leverage existing Agent Skills across different AI platforms.

Bridging the Gap with MCP

The solution lies in exposing Agent Skills as MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools. MCP is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to language models. By converting Agent Skills into MCP tools, any agent that supports MCP can access and utilize these specialized capabilities.

Introducing agent-skills-mcp

  agent-skills-mcp   is an MCP server that bridges this gap, allowing Amazon Q Developer, Kiro, and other MCP-compatible agents to use existing Agent Skills. The server scans for skill files and exposes them through the MCP protocol.

How It Works

  1. Skill Discovery: The server recursively scans a configured folder for  SKILL.md  files
  1. Skill Parsing: Each skill file is parsed to extract metadata and content
  1. MCP Exposure: Skills are made available as MCP tools that agents can call

Quick Setup

To use Agent Skills with Amazon Q Developer or Kiro, simply add the MCP server to your configuration:
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "skills": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["agent-skills-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "SKILL_FOLDER": "~/skills"
      }
    }
  }
}
This configuration will load skills from  ~/skills  folder. To test it, you can clone Anthropic's skills to that folder:
git clone https://github.com/anthropics/skills.git ~/skills
Now start your Amazon Q Developer or Kiro, you should be able to see the skills loaded as tools.

Benefits

  • Cross-Platform Compatibility: Use the same Agent Skills across different AI agents
  • Knowledge Reuse: Leverage existing skill investments across your AI toolchain
  • Standardized Access: MCP provides a consistent interface for skill access
  • Easy Integration: Simple JSON configuration gets you started
# kiro# amazon-q-developer# mcp-server# developer-tools# agents
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