Agent skills

Reply.io outbound expertise for AI agents — 18 plain-markdown skills in three installable packs, teaching an agent how outbound actually works, with guardrails and explicit human-approval gates. One command installs them: reply skills install.

Status: Available

reply-skills is the knowledge core of the Reply Agentic Toolkit: 18 skills that teach an agent how to run real outbound — shape an audience, plan and launch a campaign, work the replies, read the numbers honestly — with protection guardrails and explicit human-approval gates for anything that touches a real prospect.

Skills are plain markdown in the open Agent Skills format, so they work in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI and any SKILL.md-compatible host.

AI agent  →  Reply skills (procedure, guardrails)  →  reply CLI  →  Reply.io v3 API

The skill decides what to do; the CLI does it.

Three packs

The outbound expertise is independent of any product, and the Reply.io execution layer is a separate, replaceable pack. The core stands on its own, so start with as much or as little as you want:

Pack	What it gives your agent	Requires
`ai-sdr-core` (9 skills)	The vendor-neutral core: what an SDR operation is, outbound strategy and playbooks, and the guardrails — sending limits, channel limits, approval boundaries. Works with any provider, or none — and it is the methodology every other pack builds on, so it is worth installing on its own.	—
`reply-adapter` (5 skills)	Executes that core against Reply.io: the CLI, API v3, the MCP server, auth and scopes, error translation, and the mapping from each business operation to the endpoint that performs it.	`ai-sdr-core` + a Reply.io account
`agentic-runtime` (4 skills)	Durable multi-session work: goals, plans, work items, checkpoints, resumability, reports, user memory. Skip it if your orchestrator already does this.	`ai-sdr-core`

ai-sdr-core and agentic-runtime work with another provider, or with none — only reply-adapter requires Reply.io and the CLI. That also makes ai-sdr-core an easy place to start: the methodology and guardrails pay off from the first session, with nothing to configure. Add reply-adapter when you want your agent operating Reply.io, and agentic-runtime when work needs to outlive a single session.

Install

The recommended way is one command: reply skills install. The reply CLI detects the AI assistants on your machine and installs the packs into each one, resolving dependencies so adapter brings core with it. It is the only channel that resolves dependencies on every host, and the only one that tells you which hosts are verified — so unless you have a reason to do it by hand, use it:

npm install -g reply-cli    # needs Node.js 20 or newer
reply auth login            # OAuth in the browser; no account yet? a Reply.io trial is free
reply skills install

✓ detected Claude Code, Codex
✓ Claude Code · ai-sdr-core, reply-adapter, agentic-runtime installed
✓ Codex       · ai-sdr-core, reply-adapter, agentic-runtime installed
Start a new session in each assistant so the skills load.

Install a subset, target one assistant, or scope the install to a repository:

reply skills install core              # aliases: core · adapter · runtime
reply skills install adapter runtime
reply skills install --agent codex
reply skills install --project
reply skills list                      # what is installed where
reply skills update                    # bring installed packs to the latest version

Claude Code and Codex are the two hosts this is verified against. For Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini CLI and GitHub Copilot the installer writes to each host’s documented skills directory, but that those hosts read from it has not been confirmed — the command says so in its output.

Without the CLI

A fallback, not an equal alternative: nothing here resolves dependencies for you, so install ai-sdr-core first or the other packs reference guidance that is not present. Claude Code and Codex read this repository as a plugin marketplace, and the per-host manual steps are in the repository README:

claude plugin marketplace add reply-team/reply-skills
claude plugin install reply-adapter@reply-skills   # ai-sdr-core comes with it

Then ask your agent things like “I want to sell into LATAM”, “import this CSV and skip duplicates”, or “which sequences are underperforming?”.

The catalog

Each skill's frontmatter is its contract — the name, what it does, and when an agent should reach for it. Every skill is installable and in active refinement; they evolve as the platform and the models do. The canonical, always-current catalog is INDEX.md — agents should fetch that first. For a browsable version with each skill's trigger conditions, maturity and dependencies, see the Skill catalog in the docs.

`ai-sdr-core` — vendor-neutral outbound expertise

What an SDR operation is, how to plan and run one, and where an agent must stop. No Reply.io knowledge, no provider required — useful from the first session, with nothing to set up.

sdr-operations · campaign-planning · audience-building · campaign-launch · inbox-triage · performance-analysis · approval-boundaries · sending-guardrails · linkedin-guardrails

Operations — sdr-operations: the contract of atomic business operations (add a contact, enrol it, pause, reply, classify, read engagement), each carrying whether it is reversible and whether it needs a human's approval. Everything else is built on this
Strategy — campaign-planning (a vague goal becomes an executable plan), audience-building (shape an audience, and name where one comes from when the user has no list yet), campaign-launch (every precondition checked before anything goes live), inbox-triage (the replies that matter first, responses sent only after approval), performance-analysis (an honest read that separates deliverability from copy from targeting)
Protection — approval-boundaries (where an agent stops and asks, and the one case where acting first is right), sending-guardrails (domain authentication, warm-up, volume pacing, bounce recovery), linkedin-guardrails (invitation pacing, daily limits, recovery when the platform flags activity)
Full reference: INDEX.md

`reply-adapter` — executing that against Reply.io

The provider layer: how each business operation is actually performed against Reply.

reply-operations-mapping · reply-api · reply-auth · reply-cli · reply-mcp

reply-operations-mapping — each business operation mapped to the endpoint group that performs it, the scope it needs, the order to call things in, and how Reply's errors translate back into operation outcomes. This is what lets an agent compose correct calls instead of guessing
reply-api — discover endpoints through the machine-readable docs, respect scopes and rate limits, handle problem+json errors and background jobs
reply-auth — key types (personal, Team, Organization), the domain:verb scopes model, acting-user headers, and the team resolution errors (TEAM_REQUIRED, USER_REQUIRED)
reply-cli — sign in, manage profiles and team context, call any v3 endpoint via reply api
reply-mcp — connect an MCP client to mcp.reply.io, and choose between MCP tools and the CLI
Composes: Contact Data API , Sequence API , Conversations & Inbox API , Analytics API
Full reference: INDEX.md

`agentic-runtime` — work that survives the session

Optional. Skip it if your orchestrator already provides durable work.

durable-work · execution-reporting · orchestrator-integration · user-memory

durable-work — goals, plans, work items, checkpoints, approval pauses, recovery and resumption, kept as plain markdown in a workspace you own
execution-reporting — reports that become organisational memory: structure, evidence, honest deviations, and feeding results back into the next planning pass
orchestrator-integration — which orchestrator owns scheduling and resumption, and how to keep two of them from fighting over the same workspace
user-memory — preferences, ICP definitions and playbooks kept so a fresh session does not have to ask again
Full reference: INDEX.md

Safety model

Skills never let an agent start a sequence, send a message, or delete data without your explicit confirmation in the conversation. Bulk operations show their plan first. Protective actions (pausing a burning campaign) are the one exception — action first, immediate notification.

The gate is not just prose: it is mechanically bound by scoped API keys — grant an agent only the scopes its workflows need.

The workspace

Long-running campaigns persist state in a workspace — a plain-markdown directory (marked by reply-workspace.yaml) holding goals, plans, work items, reports, and your memory/. Any agent can pick up where the last session stopped. Spec: workspace-spec.md, shipped inside the durable-work skill.

Source

Repo: github.com/reply-team/reply-skills — the catalog is INDEX.md
The contract every skill follows: docs/skill-contract.md
Execution layer and installer: Reply CLI (npmjs.com/package/reply-cli) — reply skills install
Docs: Skills overview · Skill catalog · Choose your interface

Frequently asked questions

Do skills exist today?

Yes — 18 of them, in three packs. Install the reply CLI, sign in with reply auth login, then run reply skills install: it finds the AI assistants on your machine and puts the packs into each one, dependencies resolved. Claude Code and Codex can also read the repository as a plugin marketplace directly. The always-current catalog is INDEX.md in the repo.

What is a skill, concretely?

A folder of markdown instructions (SKILL.md plus supporting files) that an agent platform loads on demand. It encodes which operation to perform, in what order, what to verify, and where to stop for human confirmation. There is no runtime code — execution goes through the reply CLI or the API, so behaviour is deterministic and testable.

Do I need the CLI to use them?

For reply-adapter, yes — it executes against Reply.io, and the CLI is how it does that. ai-sdr-core and agentic-runtime need neither: the first is vendor-neutral outbound expertise and the second is a way of keeping long work alive across sessions, and both are useful with another provider, or with none. Install either and your agent gains that knowledge straight away, which makes ai-sdr-core a natural place to start — add reply-adapter when you want the agent running real outreach.

How is this different from MCP?

MCP gives an agent tools — individual operations. Skills give it procedure — multi-step workflows with confirmation gates, verification, and guardrails. They compose: an agent can follow a skill's procedure using MCP tools or CLI commands. See Choose your interface.

What if I have no prospect list yet?

The skills route you rather than refusing. audience-building names where an audience comes from — a list you already have, your own sourcing tooling, the provider’s own prospect search where it has one, or manual research for a short high-value list — and insists the ICP is stated before sourcing starts, because an audience assembled without one cannot be judged afterwards. On the Reply side, reply-operations-mapping covers Prospect Search and intent signals as the betas they are, with previewing a search before running it as a hard rule, and records Enrichment as documented but not yet callable. No skill depends on a capability that is not there.