Saltus MCP Skill

A ready-to-use agent skill for connecting AI clients to the saltus/* MCP/Abilities surface. Drop it into your agent's skills directory and it will guide the agent through health checks, discovery, safe reads, and confirmed writes — without you repeating the integration rules.

Download

Download SKILL.md

Or fetch it directly:

curl -L -o saltus-mcp-SKILL.md \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SaltusDev/saltus-framework/main/.agents/skills/saltus-mcp/SKILL.md

Why use it

Saltus exposes 18 saltus/* abilities over WordPress-native MCP/Abilities. Clients that treat them as raw REST calls tend to:

• guess post type slugs instead of discovering them with list_models
• write meta before checking the normalized field paths from list_meta_fields
• retry permission failures that will not resolve until roles change
• fire broad list queries as a discovery shortcut, tripping rate limits
• force-delete without explicit confirmation

The skill encodes the guardrails the framework already expects — the health-first call flow, normalized metadata reasoning, read-confirm-write confirmation, and permission/rate-limit handling — so any agent that loads it behaves correctly out of the box.

How to install

Copy SKILL.md into your agent's skills folder. For example, for a filesystem-based agent:

mkdir -p ~/.agents/skills/saltus-mcp
curl -L -o ~/.agents/skills/saltus-mcp/SKILL.md \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SaltusDev/saltus-framework/main/.agents/skills/saltus-mcp/SKILL.md

The skill front matter declares when it applies:

name: saltus-mcp
description: >-
  Use when connecting an AI agent/client to Saltus Framework MCP/Abilities
  (saltus/*) on an active WordPress site — discovery, health-first flow,
  model/meta inspection, safe read/write patterns, permission and rate-limit
  handling, and write confirmation flows.

Agents that auto-load skills by description will pick it up whenever a task mentions connecting to Saltus MCP or working with saltus/* tools.

How it works

The skill is a single self-contained SKILL.md organized around the client integration guide:

1. Discovery — filter abilities for the saltus/ prefix and trust the ability metadata (meta.mcp_tool, meta.namespace, meta.transport).
2. Health first — call saltus/get-health at session start and branch on status, error_rate, and latency.
3. Model and metadata discovery — saltus/list-models and saltus/list-meta-fields before touching content; prefer normalized.fields paths.
4. Safe reads — list, confirm, then single-get with small page sizes.
5. Safe writes — read model/meta, build a minimal patch, summarize to the user, execute, then re-read to confirm.
6. Destructive actions — require explicit confirmation for force deletes, bulk deletes, reordering, settings updates, and serialized-meta writes.
7. Failure handling — never retry permission failures; respect retry_after on rate limits; confirm mutations against the post-write cache clear.
8. Planning heuristics — an intent-to-first-tools table and copy-paste prompt guidance for agents.
9. Anti-patterns — the behaviors to avoid.

Example

A task like "update the director of the movie with the slug interstellar" resolves through the skill's flow:

1. Call saltus/get-health → status: ok.
2. Call saltus/list-models → find the movie post type.
3. Call saltus/get-meta-fields with post_type: "movie" → normalized path director maps to the writable meta root.
4. Call saltus/list-posts with post_type: "movie", search: "interstellar" → confirm the post ID with the user.
5. Call saltus/get-post → read current director value.
6. Summarize: "Update director on post 42 (Interstellar) from 'Nolan' to 'Christopher Nolan'?"
7. Call saltus/update-post with post_id: 42, meta: { director: "Christopher Nolan" }.
8. Call saltus/get-post again → report the confirmed value.

Keeping it in sync

• The authoritative copy lives in the repository at .agents/skills/saltus-mcp/SKILL.md.
• The docs site serves a copy at /downloads/saltus-mcp/SKILL.md for direct download.
• The skill mirrors Client Integration; when the client guidance changes, update both.

Further Reading

• MCP/Abilities Overview
• Abilities Reference
• Client Integration