ESO AI Skills

A collection of AI agent skills for astronomers working with ESO data services and tools.

These skills are designed to be small, composable, and easy to adapt. They work with any AI coding agent — GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, and others. Each skill encodes expert knowledge about a specific ESO service or workflow so you don't have to repeat yourself.

This repository may eventually move to the ESO GitHub organisation.

Quickstart

Run the installer and pick the skills and agents you want:

npx skills@latest add szampier/skills

Manual install

Clone the repository and symlink the skills you want into your agent's skills directory:

git clone https://github.com/szampier/skills.git eso-skills

GitHub Copilot CLI:

ln -s $(pwd)/eso-skills/skills/archive/eso-tap-obs ~/.agents/skills/user/eso-tap-obs

Claude Code:

ln -s $(pwd)/eso-skills/skills/archive/eso-tap-obs ~/.claude/skills/eso-tap-obs

Then invoke the skill in your agent session (e.g. /eso-tap-obs).

Skills

Archive

Skills for querying and working with the ESO Science Archive.

• eso-tap-obs — Query ivoa.ObsCore via the TAP protocol. Translates natural-language requests into ADQL queries, TAP sync URLs, and ESO Science Portal links. Resolves target names via SIMBAD.
• eso-tap-cat — Query PI-delivered scientific catalogues from ESO public surveys via tap_cat. Discovers tables, resolves targets, builds cone-search ADQL.
• astroquery-eso — Query the ESO Science Archive using the astroquery.eso Python API. Covers raw, Phase 3, and instrument-specific data; downloading; calibration retrieval.

EDPS

Skills for developing and modifying EDPS (ESO Data Processing System) instrument pipeline workflows.

• edps-workflow — Add and modify tasks, datasources, and classification rules in EDPS instrument workflow packages.

Contributing

1. Pick a category under skills/ (or propose a new one)
2. Create skills/<category>/<skill-name>/SKILL.md following the template below
3. Add an entry to the category's README.md and the top-level README.md
4. Open a pull request

Skill template

---
name: skill-name
description: One sentence. Use when [specific triggers].
---

# Skill Name

## Quick start

[Minimal working example]

## Workflows

[Step-by-step process]

The description field is what the agent reads to decide whether to load the skill — make it specific.