Use cdkd with AI Coding Agents

An AI coding agent such as Claude Code, Codex or Cursor can deploy your dev and test stacks with cdkd. To make it do so safely, install the cdkd skill: a set of instructions the agent loads when a task involves cdkd.

cdkd suits this work because an agent deploys, checks the result, and tears the stack down many times in one session. Fast deploys and an equally fast cdkd destroy keep each of those turns short.

What the skill teaches the agent

The cdkd skill ships in the cdkd repository. It tells the agent how to:

install cdkd,
check AWS credentials before acting,
preview a deploy and then run it,
choose a wait mode,
verify the result,
avoid deploying over a stack that CloudFormation manages,
confirm with you before a destructive operation.

How you install the skill depends on the agent.

Claude Code

Run these two commands inside a Claude Code session:

/plugin marketplace add go-to-k/cdkd
/plugin install cdkd-skills@cdkd

This is a one-time setup, and the skill is then available in every session. Ask Claude to deploy a dev or test CDK stack with cdkd, and the skill loads on its own. You can also invoke it directly with /cdkd.

Other agents (Codex, Cursor, and more)

Any agent that reads SKILL.md files can use the skill. Install it with the GitHub CLI (v2.90 or later) or with npx skills:

gh skill install go-to-k/cdkd cdkd
# or
npx skills add go-to-k/cdkd --skill cdkd

Let an agent read these docs

An agent can read this documentation as Markdown, in two ways:

The site publishes an llms.txt index, which lists every page. An agent can start there and find the page it needs.
Every page has a raw-Markdown version. The page head advertises it with a <link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown"> tag, so an agent can fetch the exact source of the page it is reading.

Testing a cdkd checkout with Claude Code

This section is for people who work on cdkd itself. To test a cdkd checkout against another CDK project, add the cloned repository to a Claude Code session:

claude --add-dir /path/to/cdkd

The repository's /use-cdkd skill then covers building and linking the checkout.