Get started with the Agent Toolkit for AWS in the AWS CLI

AI coding agents such as Kiro, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and others play an increasingly important role in developer workflows. They write code, fix bugs, scaffold projects, and build infrastructure. By default, these agents have general knowledge of AWS. The Agent Toolkit for AWS gives them specialized, up-to-date expertise, so they’re more likely to pick the right services for the task, use modern APIs, and follow security best practices.

With one command in the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), your coding agent gets curated AWS expertise.

In this post I walk through what’s in the toolkit, how to install it, and how to manage skills as your work evolves.

What’s in the Agent Toolkit for AWS?

• AWS skills – A curated catalog of Markdown files that teach your agent how AWS works. The skills cover a wide range of AWS services and common developer workflows. Each skill is curated and maintained by AWS service teams and updated as services evolve.
• The AWS MCP Server – A secure, auditable connection your agent can use to reach thousands of AWS APIs through the Model Context Protocol. With the AWS MCP Server, your agent can list resources, search documentation, and call AWS APIs using your existing AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) credentials.

These components give your agent the context to write better AWS code, take safer actions, and reach for the right service the first time. The catalog keeps growing as more AWS service teams contribute skills.

Prerequisites

• AWS CLI version 2.35.0 or newer. See the AWS CLI v2 install guide to install or upgrade.
• One or more supported AI coding agents installed locally. Kiro, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other popular AI coding agents are supported. You can run aws configure agent-toolkit to display the supported agents and detect which are present on your machine.

Set up the Agent Toolkit

To start the interactive setup, use the following command:

aws configure agent-toolkit

The wizard detects the supported AI coding agents on your machine, and you choose which ones to set up. For each agent you select, it installs a default set of AWS skills and configures the AWS MCP Server connection. You can add, update, or remove skills afterward with the aws agent-toolkit commands.

The entire process typically takes a few seconds. The next time you open a chat session, your agent has AWS expertise loaded.

In a non-interactive environment, such as continuous integration or a development container, use the --yes option to accept defaults without prompts:

aws configure agent-toolkit --yes

To explore the other available options, run aws configure agent-toolkit help, or see the AWS CLI section of the Agent Toolkit for AWS User Guide.

Extend as your project grows

You can add, update, and remove skills at any time to match what you’re building. The skills installed by default cover common workflows, but as your project grows, you may need additional skills. Consider a serverless document-processing application that stores uploaded files in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The application requires semantic search over the uploaded files, implemented with Amazon S3 Vectors, a recently released capability. Because the capability is new, the agent might lack current guidance for it. Complete the following steps to install the relevant skill so the agent has up-to-date guidance before it generates code.

Check what’s installed:

aws agent-toolkit list-installed-skills

The default install doesn’t include a vectors skill. Search for one and add it:

aws agent-toolkit search-skills --search-query vectors
aws agent-toolkit add-skill --skill-name storing-and-querying-vectors

search-skills matches against skill names and descriptions across the full catalog. add-skill downloads the skill and installs it to each detected agent. Use --agent to target a specific one.

As the toolkit and its skills evolve, you can keep them current or remove them:

aws agent-toolkit update-skill aws-cdk
aws agent-toolkit remove-skill aws-cdk

Conclusion

In this post, I showed how to use the Agent Toolkit for AWS to give your AI coding agent AWS expertise and context with a single AWS CLI command. The toolkit installs a curated set of skills, configures the AWS MCP Server for the agents you select, and gives you simple commands to search, install, update, and remove skills as your needs evolve. The result is an agent that writes better AWS code, follows the latest best practices, and gets the answer right the first time more often.
To get started, install or upgrade the AWS CLI to version 2.35.0 or newer, then run aws configure agent-toolkit.

Try it today and tell us what you think. Open an issue or feature request on the AWS CLI GitHub repository