Show HN: Skills – Making AI coding tools aware of government standards

6 points

4 months ago

I work as an engineer at the Dutch government. We have hundreds of technical standards that developers should follow when building government software: API design rules, messaging protocols, authentication profiles, accessibility requirements. The problem is that most developers don't know these standards exist until someone reviews their code (if at all).

Skills are Markdown files that inject domain knowledge into AI coding tools. When a developer starts building an API, the tool automatically loads the relevant standard. No plugins to write, no code. Just structured knowledge in Markdown.

I built a marketplace (https://github.com/MinBZK/overheid-claude-plugins) with now 38 skills covering Dutch government standards. Skills are an open standard (https://agentskills.io/) adopted by Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and others.

The interesting part, certainly for a government: you don't have to be a developer to write a skill. A policy officer who knows the standard can structure it in Markdown and suddenly every developer using these tools gets that knowledge for free.

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