Sitecore AI Skills: Put a Sitecore Expert Inside Your AI Assistant

Do you enjoy asking an AI assistant a Sitecore question and getting back a confident answer about an API that was retired three versions ago? Or a PowerShell script that would happily rewrite every item under /sitecore/content with no dry run, no backup and no second thought? If so, this post isn’t for you. If not, read on.

General-purpose AI is good at general-purpose problems. Sitecore isn’t one. It’s a platform with a long memory (XP, XM, JSS, SXA, headless SXA, XM Cloud, now SitecoreAI), real production risk, and a CMS that sits behind a login an AI assistant can’t (and shouldn’t) reach. It’s not atypical for an AI to know about Sitecore without knowing how an experienced Sitecore architect or administrator actually works through a problem. That gap is what AI skills close.

What Is an AI Skill?

An AI skill is packaged expertise. It’s a folder an AI assistant loads when your request matches what the skill is for, and it contains three things:

• Instructions (a SKILL.md file): the workflow an expert follows. This covers the questions to ask, decision trees, the rules that prevent common mistakes, and what the finished deliverable looks like.
• Tools: scripts that do the deterministic work the same way every time (ex. scanning a repo, parsing logs, generating a component).
• References: deeper documentation, templates and checklists that are only pulled in when the task needs them.

Skills follow the Agent Skills format used by Claude, but they aren’t locked to Claude. Every script runs on its own, and every SKILL.md is plain Markdown. You can follow one as a runbook, or load it into GitHub Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT or whatever assistant your organization has approved.

Why Use a Skill?

Because a prompt is a request, and a skill is a process. With a skill:

• The assistant asks before it assumes. It requests the evidence it needs (ex. your showconfig.xml, a log file, an SPE export) instead of guessing.
• It works the way your Sitecore team should. The Content SDK migration skill checks for Experience Editor code and editing-secret mismatches because those are what break in Pages. The serialization skill flags CreateUpdateAndDelete over /sitecore/content because that’s how authored content gets wiped in production.
• Results are repeatable. Scripts produce the same report every time, so findings can be compared, tracked and dropped into CI.
• It’s safe by default. This is critical for anything that touches content. Every script that writes to Sitecore is a dry run first, scoped, previewed, capped and backed up. Publishing is always a separate, deliberate step.
• Your credentials stay put. Since the CMS is behind a login, the skills give you read-only scripts to run inside Sitecore and then analyze what you bring back. Nothing needs access to your environments.

Introducing the Sitecore AI Skills Library

The Sitecore AI Skills are part of my free, MIT-licensed AI Skills Library. The first set targets the most in-demand Sitecore developer and administrator needs across XP/XM and SitecoreAI. More skills will be added over time, so watch the repo or suggest the next one.

Developer Skills

Content SDK Migration
JSS 22.x is out of support and JSS 23.x doesn’t support SitecoreAI. This skill scans your Next.js app for JSS usage and scores the effort. It then produces a migration plan to the Content SDK, does the mechanical conversions, and checks the things that silently break in Pages.

XP to SitecoreAI Migration
This skill inventories an XP/XM solution (ex. pipelines, MVC renderings, xDB usage, Solr queries, modules) and classifies every customization as keep, rebuild, replace, move to edge, or retire. It then produces an assessment with effort ranges and a recommendation: migrate now, upgrade first, or stay.

Headless Component Builder
This skill generates the Next.js component, the SPE script that creates the data template and JSON rendering, and the GraphQL query, all from one spec. They match exactly, which means no more “Unknown component” in Pages.

Serialization & CI/CD
This skill analyzes your SCS modules for overlaps, invalid scopes, duplicate IDs, secrets in YAML, leftover Unicorn/TDS, and include settings that can delete author content. It also provides GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps pipelines with a CI gate.

Marketplace App Builder
This skill builds SitecoreAI Marketplace apps (ex. Pages context panels, custom fields, dashboard widgets) with the Marketplace SDK. It’s the modern home for the Content Editor customizations you can’t carry forward from XP.

Administrator Skills

Publishing Troubleshooter
“I published and nothing changed.” This skill uses an SPE diagnostic, a publish-log parser and decision trees for both XP/XM and Experience Edge to find the actual root cause, not the usual guesses.

Security & Access Audit
This skill exports users, roles and access rights, then ranks the findings by severity. It catches admin sprawl, dormant accounts, deny rules hiding content, and non-admins with PowerShell access. It also includes a hardening checklist for self-hosted XP and identity hygiene for SitecoreAI.

Log & Performance Diagnostics
This skill turns Sitecore logs, IIS logs and the cache and stats admin pages into a short, ranked list of real causes. Those include recycle reasons, failing remote event handlers, renderings walking thousands of items per request, and caches pinned at their limit.

Search & Index Operations
This skill reviews your index configuration and Crawling logs for the misconfigurations that hurt. Examples are SwitchOnRebuild pointing at the live core, two indexes sharing one core, and syncMaster on large repositories. It favors targeted re-indexing over full rebuilds, and it maps out search options for SitecoreAI.

Content Governance with SPE
This skill includes nine read-only audits: broken links, unused and oversized media, stale workflow items, missing translations, SEO gaps, oversized folders and orphaned datasources. It also has a generator that turns a spreadsheet of changes into a safe, dry-run-first bulk update script.

Getting Started

1. Browse the Sitecore AI Skills and open the README of the skill that matches your problem.
2. Using Claude? Copy the skill folder into ~/.claude/skills/ for Claude Code, or upload it under Settings ? Capabilities ? Skills in the Claude apps. Then just describe your problem.
3. Not using Claude? Run the scripts directly (Python 3, standard library only) and the SPE scripts in the PowerShell ISE. Use the SKILL.md as your runbook, or load it into your assistant of choice.

It’s imperative that you run any script that writes content in a non-production environment first. The skills are built to be safe, but your environment is unique, and that’s a habit worth keeping regardless of who (or what) wrote the script.

These skills will keep growing. If there’s a Sitecore task you’d like to see packaged as a skill, or you’ve put one through its paces on a real XP or SitecoreAI instance, open an issue on the repo. Real-world feedback is what will make the next set better.