Agent Skills

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Coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and others can work with Materialize using the open-source Materialize agent skills. These skills follow the Agent Skills Open Standard and work with any coding agent that supports the standard. Once installed, these skills give your coding agent access to Materialize documentation and reference material so it can provide more accurate assistance when writing queries, setting up sources, creating materialized views, and more.

Installation

You can install the Materialize agent skills in one of two ways:

As a plugin, if you use Claude Code or Codex. The plugin installs all the skills at once and can keep them updated automatically.
With npx skills, for any coding agent that supports the Agent Skills standard.

Choose one method. Installing the skills with both the plugin and npx skills results in duplicate copies of each skill.

Install as a plugin

When you install the skills as a plugin, they are namespaced under the plugin name, for example materialize:mz-dbt.

If you already installed the skills with npx skills, remove them before you install the plugin. The command lists both the current and the previous skill names, and skips any you don’t have. Run it in each project where you installed them, or add -g if you installed them globally:

npx skills remove mz-docs mz-dbt mz-debug-freshness mz-deploy mz-health-check mz-ontology-design mz-optimize-memory mz-terraform-provider mz-terraform-self-managed materialize-docs materialize-dbt materialize-debug-freshness materialize-terraform-provider materialize-terraform-self-managed mcp-developer-analysis

Claude Code

To install the plugin, run:

/plugin marketplace add MaterializeInc/agent-skills
/plugin install materialize@materialize

Auto-update is off by default for this marketplace. To turn it on, run /plugin, select Marketplaces, choose materialize, and select Enable auto-update. Claude Code then checks for updates in the background and asks you to run /reload-plugins when there is one.

To update by hand, run:

/plugin marketplace update materialize
/plugin update materialize@materialize
/reload-plugins

Codex

To install the plugin, run:

codex plugin marketplace add MaterializeInc/agent-skills
codex plugin add materialize@materialize

To update, run:

codex plugin marketplace upgrade materialize

Install with npx

Node.js (v16 or later) must be installed to use npx skills.

To install the skills, run:

npx skills add MaterializeInc/agent-skills

Upgrade skills

We publish upgrades to the Materialize agent skills weekly, so check back regularly to pick up the latest documentation and reference material. To upgrade the skills you already have installed:

npx skills update MaterializeInc/agent-skills

To upgrade every skill installed on your machine, regardless of source, omit the repository:

npx skills update

Migrate from the previous skill names

All skills now use the mz- prefix: materialize-docs is now mz-docs, and mcp-developer-analysis is now mz-health-check. If you installed the skills before the rename, remove the old copies and install the skills again, so each skill appears once under its new name. Run these in each project where you installed them, or add -g to both commands if you installed them globally:

npx skills remove materialize-docs materialize-dbt materialize-debug-freshness materialize-terraform-provider materialize-terraform-self-managed mcp-developer-analysis
npx skills add MaterializeInc/agent-skills

Skills

Skill	Description
`mz-health-check`	Use for operational introspection and troubleshooting via the `materialize-developer` server. Covers exact catalog schemas, diagnostic workflows, remediation runbooks, and guardrails for known pitfalls (cluster-scoped queries, uint8 ID mismatches, etc.). Examples: “why is my materialized view stale?”, “what can I optimize to save costs?”, “is my source healthy?”
`mz-debug-freshness`	Use for diagnosing why an object is behind wall-clock time, from the lag ranking down to the operator and the SQL responsible; pairs with the `materialize-developer` server. Covers reading `mz_wallclock_global_lag` as a distribution, the status sweep that catches a stalled source whose frontier still looks current, lag history, hop-by-hop attribution through `mz_materialization_lag`, hydration and replica selection before `EXPLAIN ANALYZE`, per-operator cost and worker skew, and mapping an operator back to the clause that produced it. Diagnosis only, not remediation. Examples: “which object is causing my freshness alert?”, “is this delay ingestion or compute?”, “why is this dataflow falling behind its input?”
`mz-optimize-memory`	Use for reducing the memory footprint and cost of a compute cluster; works over SQL or the `materialize-developer` MCP server. Covers finding which objects hold the memory, choosing and sizing the fix (indexes to add or drop, `GROUP SIZE` hints, slimmer views, subquery rewrites), verifying each change by measurement on an experiment cluster, and sizing the replica afterwards. Examples: “why is this cluster using so much memory?”, “can I downsize this replica?”, “which of these indexes should I drop?”
`mz-docs`	Use for authoring view definitions, learning concepts, and looking up patterns; useful with either MCP server. Covers comprehensive Materialize documentation, including SQL syntax, idiomatic patterns, data ingestion, concepts, and best practices (400+ reference files). Examples: “show me how to deduplicate a stream”, “what’s the idiomatic top-K pattern?”, “how do I create a Kafka source?”
`mz-dbt`	Use for managing Materialize pipelines with dbt. Covers dbt-materialize adapter usage: materializations, profile configuration, index creation, blue/green deployments, and testing. Examples: “write a dbt model for a materialized view”, “how do I do a blue/green deployment with dbt?”
`mz-terraform-provider`	Use for managing Materialize resources declaratively with Terraform. Covers provider configuration for Cloud and self-managed, navigation into the provider’s auto-generated resource reference, cross-resource patterns, import workflows, and gotchas. Examples: “create a Kafka source with Terraform”, “import my existing clusters into Terraform state”, “set up RBAC grants in Terraform”
`mz-terraform-self-managed`	Use for deploying or operating self-managed Materialize infrastructure with Terraform. Covers module layout and variables for deploying on AWS, Azure, and GCP: networking, Kubernetes, backend URL formats, instance sizing, upgrades, and gotchas. Examples: “deploy Materialize on EKS”, “what instance types should Materialize nodes use?”, “upgrade my self-managed Materialize”
`mz-deploy`	Use for managing a declarative SQL project and deploying changes to Materialize safely. Covers project layout, the compile → test → apply → stage → wait → promote lifecycle, hash-based change detection, atomic `ALTER ... SWAP` promotion, conflict detection, stable API schemas and replacement materialized views, offline type checking with `types.lock`, per-profile suffixes, variables, and file overrides, and the `EXECUTE UNIT TEST` syntax. Examples: “how do I deploy my sql changes safely?”, “what does mz-deploy stage do?”, “why did my promote fail with a conflict?”
`mz-ontology-design`	Use for structuring and reviewing the semantic layer of a Materialize SQL code base as a canonical ontology. Covers the `raw` → `core` → use-case database layering and how to enforce it, the admission test for a public semantic object, the grain of entities, events, measurements, and relationship objects, cross-source identity and temporal semantics, reference edges versus relationship objects, the `core.public.relationships` registry, and the `COMMENT ON` documentation contract. Examples: “how should I organize my databases and schemas?”, “does this view belong in the shared layer or at the edge?”, “review my code base for leaked private schemas”

SQL language server plugin

The materialize Claude Code plugin marketplace also provides the mz-sql-lsp plugin, which registers the mz-deploy language server for .sql files, so Claude Code navigates your project instead of grepping it. See AI agent setup for installation and configuration.

Reduce permission prompts (Claude Code)

Claude Code prompts before reading files outside your project, so it may ask to approve reads each time the mz-docs skill opens a new documentation subdirectory. To stop these prompts, grant read access to the directory where the skill is installed in ~/.claude/settings.json.

If you installed the skills as a plugin, grant the plugin’s cache directory. The directory below it changes with every plugin update, so grant the parent:

{
  "permissions": {
    "additionalDirectories": ["~/.claude/plugins/cache/materialize"]
  }
}

If you installed the skills globally with npx skills, they live under ~/.claude/skills/. Grant the mz-docs skill’s directory:

{
  "permissions": {
    "additionalDirectories": ["~/.claude/skills/mz-docs"]
  }
}

This grants access to just that one skill’s directory. If you have multiple skills installed and want to cover them all at once, you can broaden the path to ~/.claude/skills, though scoping to a single skill is the safer default.

Claude Code’s auto permission mode also removes the prompts, but applies to all tools rather than just this directory.