AgentKit Architecture

ClaudeKit is powered by AgentKit — a multi-kit system that organizes skills, agents, and workflows into composable toolkits.

What Is AgentKit?

AgentKit is the underlying framework that ships, versions, and installs ClaudeKit skills. It replaced the older claudekit-engineer monorepo structure in early 2026.

Key change: Skills no longer live in a single claudekit-engineer/.claude/ directory. They are organized into three kits in the agentkit repository, each with its own release cycle.

The Three Kits

agentkit/
└── kits/
    ├── engineer/    # Development & automation skills
    ├── marketing/   # Content, campaigns, brand skills
    └── core/        # Shared skills used by both kits

Engineer Kit (kits/engineer/)

Skills for software development workflows:

  • Feature implementation (cook, fix, brainstorm)
  • Code quality (test, code-review, security-scan)
  • Developer tooling (worktree, ship, journal, retro)
  • AI & automation (agent-browser, agentize, gkg, graphify)

Marketing Kit (kits/marketing/)

Skills for content and campaign management:

  • Content creation (social, email, video, slides)
  • Brand & design (brand, logo-design, banner-design)
  • Analytics & strategy (analytics, seo, competitor, pricing-strategy)
  • Campaign management (campaign, launch-strategy, paid-ads)

Core Kit (kits/core/)

Shared skills available to both engineer and marketing kits:

  • Implementation (cook, fix, scout)
  • Language & frameworks (frontend-design, backend-development, databases)
  • Utilities (ai-multimodal, ai-artist, media-processing, document-skills)
  • Auth & payments (better-auth, payment-integration)

How Skills Install to Your Machine

When you run ck init -g --kit engineer, the CLI:

  1. Downloads the selected kit release from GitHub
  2. Installs skills to ~/.claude/skills/ (global) or ./.claude/skills/ (local)
  3. Installs agents to ~/.claude/agents/
  4. Copies configuration files (.ck.json, .ckignore, settings.json)

After installation, your file layout:

~/.claude/
├── skills/
│   ├── cook/            # From kits/core/skills/cook/
│   │   └── SKILL.md
│   ├── brainstorm/      # From kits/engineer/skills/brainstorm/
│   │   └── SKILL.md
│   ├── frontend-design/ # From kits/core/skills/frontend-design/
│   │   └── SKILL.md
│   └── ...              # All skills from your selected kit
├── agents/
│   ├── planner.md
│   ├── tester.md
│   └── ...
├── .ck.json             # ClaudeKit configuration
├── .ckignore            # Paths excluded from LLM context
└── settings.json        # Claude Code hook settings

The installed ~/.claude/skills/ directory is what Claude Code reads at runtime. The agentkit/kits/ paths are the source — not what your machine uses directly.

Skill Invocation

Skills are invoked with /ck:skill-name syntax in Claude Code:

/ck:cook implement user authentication
/ck:fix --auto
/ck:brainstorm should we use REST or GraphQL?

The prefix ck: routes to ClaudeKit skills. Skills in the marketing kit use ckm: prefix:

/ckm:social write a LinkedIn post about our launch
/ckm:brand update our color palette

Selecting a Kit

When running ck init, you choose which kit to install:

# Engineer kit (development workflows)
ck init -g --kit engineer

# Marketing kit (content & campaigns)
ck init -g --kit marketing

# Both kits (full installation)
ck init -g --kit engineer
ck init -g --kit marketing

Kits can coexist — each installs skills to the same ~/.claude/skills/ directory without conflict.

Updating Skills

To pull the latest skill updates from AgentKit:

# Update engineer kit to latest release
ck init -g --kit engineer

# Update to a specific version
ck init -g --kit engineer --release v3.1.0

The ck init command is idempotent — safe to run multiple times. It preserves any customizations you’ve made to skills using smart merge.

Source Repository

The AgentKit source is at github.com/bestagentkits/agentkit.

Individual skill source files (SKILL.md) live at:

agentkit/kits/<kit>/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md