Manage Skills Like Dependencies - James Ward | IntelliJ IDEA Tech Talks

Skills are a great way to bring specific knowledge into your AI, but how do you manage your skill.md files? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could manage them like dependencies, so we could version them, scan for security problems, etcetera. James Ward created SkillsJars to do just that! In this episode he walks us through skills, managing skills as dependencies with SkillsJars, how to consume skills in coding assistant and custom agents, and how to publish skills either through the skillsjars.com website or using Maven / Gradle. Watch this episode to learn how to manage your skills. Timestamps 00:00:00 – Intro 00:01:45 – Agent skills 00:03:07 – Zen of James 00:04:33 – JetBrains Skill Manager and Repository 00:05:04 – SkillsJars 00:10:45 – Security scanning of skills 00:11:56 – Consume SkillsJars in coding assistants 00:19:36 – IntelliJ IDEA Plugin for SkillsJars 00:22:01 – Consume SkillsJars in custom agents 00:31:56 – Publishing skills on SkillsJars 00:36:30 – ai4jvm.com 00:37:31 – MCP servers Links Agent skills: https://agentskills.io/home Skills: https://skills.md/ Zen of James: https://github.com/jamesward/skills JetBrains skill manager and skill repository: https://blog.jetbrains.com/ai/2026/04... SkillsJars website: https://www.skillsjars.com/ SkillsJars on GitHub: https://github.com/skillsjars/skillsjars JetBrains AI Assistant skills: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/ai-ass... Demo code: https://github.com/skillsjars/skillsj... SkillsJars Helper Plugin: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/... AI 4 JVM website: https://ai4jvm.com/ JetBrains Koog: https://www.jetbrains.com/koog/ JetBrains Tracy: https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/202... JavaDocs website: https://www.javadocs.dev/ Dev2Next conference: https://www.dev2next.com/ Effect Oriented Programming book: https://leanpub.com/effect-oriented-p... Follow James Ward: GitHub: https://github.com/jamesward Twitter: https://x.com/JamesWard Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jamesward.com YouTube:    / @jamesward   LinkedIn:   / jamesward   Follow Marit van Dijk: Twitter: https://x.com/MaritvanDijk77 Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/maritvandijk... YouTube:    / @maritvandijk   LinkedIn:   / maritvandijk   Website: https://maritvandijk.com/ Join us: Website: https://jb.gg/website Blog: https://jb.gg/blog X:   / intellijidea   Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/intellijidea... LinkedIn:   / intellijidea   Facebook:   / intellijidea   Download IntelliJ IDEA: https://jb.gg/download-intellij-idea