Next.js repo agent skills

Q: Does Next.js have official agent skills?

The vercel/next.js repository contains 27 skills in `.agents/skills/`, but they are marked internal. They help agents work on the Next.js codebase itself: opening PRs, backporting fixes to LTS branches, syncing React, gating tests and running benchmarks.

Q: Will these skills help me build a Next.js app?

Mostly no. They reference Next.js internals such as the `canary` branch, LTS release branches, `config-shared.ts` and the repo's PR template. If you want framework guidance for app work, look at Vercel's separate agent skills collection.

Q: Are the Next.js repo skills safe?

The scanner flagged many `rm -rf` and `rm -f` commands. Our review found they are temp file cleanup inside Vercel Sandbox VMs and generated-file cleanup in the diagram script. The one thing to watch is that create-pr tells the agent to retry blocked git and network commands with sandbox escalation.

27 internal agent skills inside the Next.js monorepo that help agents contribute to Next.js itself: PRs, backports, React syncs, tests and benchmarks.

vercel/next.js 27 skills Planning, TDD & debugging Skill & agent tooling

with caveats

Well written and actively maintained, but these are internal contributor skills for the Next.js repo itself and do little for anyone building a Next.js app.

check first: makes network calls · installs packages → security details

Depth: 3/5
Last update: today
Installs: —
Stars: 143K
Forks: 34K
License: MIT

Install

npx skills add vercel/next.js -a claude-code

Or as a Claude Code plugin:

/plugin marketplace add vercel/next.js

npx skills add vercel/next.js -a codex

npx skills add vercel/next.js

Without -a the CLI asks which of the agents it detects to install for. Install paths per agent.

Manual install and notes

Copy the skill folders you want into ~/.claude/skills/ (Claude Code) or ~/.agents/skills/ (Codex). Add -g to the command to install for all projects. The skills CLI sends anonymous telemetry; DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 turns it off.

View on GitHub

Works with (per README)

Claude Code OpenAI Codex

What Next.js repo agent skills does

This is the Next.js framework repository. It ships a set of agent skills under .agents/skills/, and they are written for agents working on the Next.js codebase, not for people building apps with Next.js. The sampled skills are marked metadata: internal: true.

The skills cover maintainer chores. create-pr walks the agent through staging only the relevant files, naming branches with an agent prefix such as claude/ or codex/, pushing, and opening a draft PR against canary with the repo's PR template. It also tells the agent not to write descriptions for fork PRs. backport-pr finds the merged commit for a PR number, branches from an LTS release branch, cherry-picks and opens the backport, and asks before touching git state if the target is unclear. Other skills cover syncing and vendoring React (react-sync, react-vendoring), feature flags, dead code elimination for edge builds (dce-edge), Rspack support, router act testing, test gating, PR status triage, stacked PRs (gh-stack) and error page work. authoring-skills explains how to write new skills and what belongs in AGENTS.md instead. A few skills include scripts: docs-diagrams renders SVG and PNG diagrams with headless Chrome, and sandbox-bench runs render and SSR benchmarks inside Vercel Sandbox VMs.

Good for

Contributors and maintainers working in a clone of vercel/next.js
Seeing how a large open-source project organizes agent skills next to AGENTS.md
Examples of careful git and PR workflows written for agents

Not for

Developers building Next.js apps who want framework guidance
Use outside the Next.js monorepo, since the skills reference its branches, files and scripts

What's inside depth 3/5

27 skills averaging about 10 KB of instructions, with reference files in a few skills and helper scripts in docs-diagrams and sandbox-bench; the repo's many test files cover the framework, not the skills.

Skills: 27
Reference docs: 21
Scripts: 16
Tests / evals: 523
Templates: 0
Avg SKILL.md: 10.2 KB

Counted from the repository file tree. How we score depth.

Dependencies and costs

git and the GitHub CLI (gh) for the PR, backport and triage skills
Node.js and pnpm from the Next.js monorepo setup
Vercel Sandbox access for the sandbox-bench scripts
Google Chrome for docs-diagrams rendering (defaults to the macOS app path, overridable with CHROME)

Security review

Check first

This is the Next.js monorepo. Its internal agent skills drive git and gh to create branches, push, open draft PRs, merge stacks, reply to review threads and dispatch CI workflows when asked. The skills we could read only render diagrams locally and build React. Most of the repo, including the sandbox-bench scripts and the gh-stack extension, was not available for review, and the repo ships wasm and .node binaries.

Worth knowing

Makes network requestsTells the agent to curl reference PNGs from the Next.js docs Vercel Blob store..agents/skills/docs-diagrams/SKILL.md:46
Makes network requestsThe generated diagram HTML loads the Inter font from fonts.googleapis.com when Chrome renders it..agents/skills/docs-diagrams/scripts/lib.mjs
Makes network requestsPolls vercel-packages.vercel.app for a preview tarball and dispatches a GitHub Actions workflow through gh..agents/skills/deploy-release-test/SKILL.md
Installs packages or toolsThe setup step installs the github/gh-stack GitHub CLI extension with gh extension install..agents/skills/gh-stack/SKILL.md
Relies on a CLI or package we could not reviewRelies on the gh-stack extension, whose source is not in the reviewed files..agents/skills/gh-stack/SKILL.md
Relies on a CLI or package we could not reviewRelies on scripts/pr-status.js, which can reply to and resolve PR review threads and rerun CI jobs; that script is not in the reviewed files..agents/skills/pr-status-triage/SKILL.md
Contains compiled binariesThe repo contains 33 binaries, including wasm modules, .node binaries and zip archives that we could not read.examples/with-webassembly/add.wasm

What we checked

The repository (34856 files) on Nov 1, 2026. Not a full review: 34160 of 34856 files were not downloaded (large repository; we reviewed the skill folders); it contains compiled binaries or archives we cannot read; we read 5 of 16 code files; it relies on code outside the repository: sandbox-bench skill scripts (.agents/skills/sandbox-bench/scripts/*.mjs, 11 files; full text not provided; they include '--sudo' and 'nohup' invocations); GitHub CLI extension github/gh-stack (installed by the gh-stack setup step); scripts/pr-status.js (used by pr-status-triage).

NVIDIA SkillSpector static scan: 40 pattern hits (Tool Misuse 21, MCP Rug Pull 11, Excessive Agency 4, Rogue Agent 3, Anti-Refusal 1). The rm hits are cleanup of output and temp files in render.sh and in the sandbox-bench scripts. We did not read the sandbox-bench scripts. The 'rm -rf /' hit appears to be a truncated match of 'rm -rf /tmp/warm-art'. The 'no warnings' anti-refusal hit describes expected test output, the npx hits are doc references to Next.js tooling, and the allowed-tools hit is an example in authoring documentation, not real frontmatter.

A review, not a certification. Skills change after we check them — read the files before installing.

License

MIT, commercial use allowed.

Can it run unattended?

Not really. Most skills are single maintainer tasks like opening a PR or a backport that ask the user before risky git changes; only the benchmark scripts run long jobs, and they are not a general unattended loop.

Alternatives to Next.js repo agent skills

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vercel-labs/agent-skills

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FAQ

Does Next.js have official agent skills?

The vercel/next.js repository contains 27 skills in .agents/skills/, but they are marked internal. They help agents work on the Next.js codebase itself: opening PRs, backporting fixes to LTS branches, syncing React, gating tests and running benchmarks.

Will these skills help me build a Next.js app?

Mostly no. They reference Next.js internals such as the canary branch, LTS release branches, config-shared.ts and the repo's PR template. If you want framework guidance for app work, look at Vercel's separate agent skills collection.

Are the Next.js repo skills safe?

The scanner flagged many rm -rf and rm -f commands. Our review found they are temp file cleanup inside Vercel Sandbox VMs and generated-file cleanup in the diagram script. The one thing to watch is that create-pr tells the agent to retry blocked git and network commands with sandbox escalation.

What can I learn from the authoring-skills skill?

It documents how the Next.js team writes skills. It lists the frontmatter fields they use (name, description, argument-hint, user-invocable, disable-model-invocation, allowed-tools, model, context, agent), how to write descriptions that auto-trigger reliably, and when content belongs in AGENTS.md instead of a skill.

Curated by Artur Puleev, AI enthusiast. Reviews are written by AI reviewers under our rubric and checked against the repository files.

Sources: GitHub repository (stars, license, file tree, last push Nov 1, 2026). Review based on the README and SKILL.md files as published.