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Agentic-Ops 7 min read

Drop a Database into Claude Code in 30 Seconds: HeliosDB Skill Bundles

Every HeliosDB product ships its own catalogue of agentic-ops skills. Instead of reading a 4 000-line README before you can use the database, you run one subcommand and an LLM coding agent — Claude Code, Codex CLI, any MCP-aware tool — gets a complete A→Z verb catalogue: every CLI flag, every REPL meta-command, every public Rust API, every MCP tool. The agent knows the database the moment it enters the project.

One-liner per product

# Nano
cargo install heliosdb-nano
heliosdb-nano skills install

# Lite
cargo install heliosdb-lite
heliosdb-lite skills install

# Full
cargo install heliosdb-full
heliosdb-full skills install

# HeliosProxy
cargo install heliosdb-proxy
heliosdb-proxy install skills

Each command unpacks a bundled .claude/skills/ tree (and mirrors it to ~/.codex/skills/) plus an aggregate AGENTS.md at project root — the de-facto convention LLM agents read first.

What a skill looks like

A skill is a single SKILL.md file scoped to one operational domain. Nano ships 17 of them: heliosdb-nano-overview, -install, -connect, -schema, -query, -transactions, -branches, -time-travel, -backup, -vector, -code-graph, -graph-rag, -mcp, -server, -deploy, -observability, -migrate. Plus two reference helpers: _index/verb-map.md (every CLI flag → SQL function → MCP tool, normalised) and _index/feature-matrix.md (cargo feature ↔ skill).

Lite ships ~50 skills across foundation, DML/DDL, ops, advanced features, security, HA/replication, and AI/agent surface. Full ships a similar catalogue plus 14-protocol-specific skills. HeliosProxy ships 22 operator skills covering pool tuning, failover rehearsal, time-travel replay, plugin signing, and PG-12→17 upgrade orchestration.

Why this matters

Coding agents are great at applying patterns they've seen, mediocre at exploring unfamiliar APIs. Without a skill catalogue, an agent fumbles through HeliosDB's surface the same way a new hire does: read the README, miss the relevant section, run the wrong command, hit a confusing error, retry. With the catalogue, the agent reads AGENTS.md once and knows the exact verb — CREATE BRANCH staging FROM main, SELECT * FROM products AS OF TIMESTAMP '2026-04-01', graph_bfs(...), WITH CONTEXT(...) — for the task in front of it.

Installer flags

  • --target claude|codex|both — default is both. Picks where the bundle lands.
  • --symlink — instead of copying, symlink into ~/.local/share/heliosdb-<product>/skills/ so re-running after a binary upgrade refreshes the bundle in place.
  • --force — overwrite any pre-existing heliosdb-* skill directories. Without this, the installer backs up existing dirs to *.bak.<unix-ts>.
  • --dry-run — print the planned actions without writing.

What's next

The skill bundles ship in every release going forward. Expect skill counts to grow with feature work — we treat skills as first-class deliverables alongside the code. If a feature ships without a skill, it doesn't ship.

Repos: Nano · Lite · Full · HeliosProxy.

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