Introducing Official Capacitor Skills

Whether you love it or hate it, AI is changing how we work as developers, and you’ve been adapting right along with it. New tools, new habits, new ways of getting code out the door. Which is probably why you’ve wondered why Capacitor doesn’t have any official AI tools of its own yet.

The Capacitor team has been thinking about them — but we didn’t want to ship something just to say that we did. We have the luxury of moving methodically in this current AI landscape and we intend to use it.

To that end, we’ve settled on AI “primitives”: small, single-purpose tools that can be composed into bigger workflows. We don’t know what the final shape of Capacitor’s AI tooling looks like yet, so we’re starting with building blocks we can compose into whatever it turns out to be — serving whoever we’re building for: the open source community, OutSystems customers, or even ourselves, the Capacitor team.

Introducing official Capacitor skills

Agents can already stand up a Capacitor app on their own pretty well. Where they need a hand is the hard part — plugins. Native code on both platforms, project configuration, behavior normalization, a single web API; plugin development is the part of Capacitor that asks the most of you and where good guidance pays off most.

So today we’re launching a repo of official Capacitor skills, starting with three primitives centered around plugin development:

• capacitor-plugin-generator turns a description into a working first-pass Capacitor plugin, built on best practices and insights from the Capacitor team.
• cordova-plugin-migrator handles end-to-end Cordova-to-Capacitor plugin migration. Plugin-level only; it won’t migrate an entire app.
• build-actions-generator writes plugin build actions for OutSystems Developer Cloud (ODC) Capacitor apps. This one is OutSystems-specific and does nothing in a standalone Capacitor app.

That last one is for our OutSystems customers; the other two are for anyone building Capacitor plugins. We use all three ourselves.

Install them for your agent of choice with skills.sh:

npx skills add ionic-team/capacitor-skills

We’ll be releasing more skills as we find the use cases best suited for us, so bookmark the repo.

Capacitor’s approach to AI in open source

The best thing about open source is that you don’t have to wait on us, and you haven’t. Plenty of Capacitor AI tools have already appeared, including two sizable skillsets from CapGo and CapAwesome. If you want help wiring AI into your workflow today — outside of what we launched — those are worth a look.

That’s open source working the way it should, and it’s exactly what shapes where we spend our effort. Where the community can build something, we want them to — we’re not here to reinvent the wheel for its own sake. We’ll take the other half: the tooling that takes deep knowledge of how Capacitor works, or that reaches into the internals of the framework itself. That’s where being first-party matters the most, and it’s the work we’re best positioned to do.

Beyond these skills, what comes next is wide open and we’d rather shape it with you than guess. So tell us, what are you reaching for when you build Capacitor apps with AI? What’s missing? Let us know on Canny.