Leveraging IBM Bob with Aspire Skills to Analyze My Existing Aspire Projects

Skills

What are skills? Some may be known as Agent Skills. Let's read some definitions.

Agent Skills are a lightweight, open format for extending AI agent capabilities with specialized knowledge and workflows.
Source: https://agentskills.io/home

Skills are folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude loads dynamically to improve performance on specialized tasks. Skills teach Claude how to complete specific tasks in a repeatable way, whether that's creating documents with your company's brand guidelines, analyzing data using your organization's specific workflows, or automating personal tasks.
Source: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/12512176-what-are-skills

Have you ever asked the AI to run your project or analyze your project, but it came out as a hallucination? For example, running the wrong command, running a command which not exist, etc. As you may know, the base knowledge of the AI may not include the specific command that you use, especially whenever you have a custom project or custom command.

I would like to learn how the skills work better while working on my Aspire Projects. I'm facing some issues lately while just using the AI with prompts and vibing. It's not getting better, but it's getting worse.

In this moment, I will try to explore Aspire Skills and use it in IBM Bob. Lately, I have used Vibe and prompts in IBM Bob to migrate my App Runner to ECS Express Mode. Let's now move on to understand the IBM Bob capability more.

Preparing Aspire guidance

Prerequisite

Ensure you have the Aspire CLI.

Let's prepare

Simply run this command:

aspire agent init

Since I will use IBM Bob, I'll select the standard location, which is .agent/skills.
I set up all the skills: aspire, aspire-deployment, aspire-init, aspire-monitoring, aspire-orchestration, aspireify, dotnet-inspect, playwright-cli, and Install Aspire MCP server. If you don't plan to use Playwright and/or Install Aspire MCP server, you can leave the default ticked values/skills.

Notes: I also installed the Aspire extension

Skill has been detected

MCP has been installed

What has IBM Bob been doing?

Fixing the migration issue.
Migrating the test to Aspire Test.

Fixing the migration issue is an easy task for IBM Bob. However, after fixing the migration issue in CI (GitHub Actions), we found that there is a test issue. After some failed attempts by IBM Bob to fix it, I decided to ask IBM Bob to migrate the test to Aspire Test. It seems to be the most crucial thing to resolve the issue.

For the first task of fixing the migration issue, we don't even need the skills. Adding skills and fixing migration issue.

It's different from the second task, which is migrating the test suite to Aspire Test. I believe IBM Bob will get the benefit from the skills. I noticed that after creating the tasks for the migration, in some tasks, IBM Bob will call the skills.

As you can see in the chat, IBM used dotnet-inspect to ensure some service (or dependencies) initialization.

However, after migrating to Aspire Test-based, I won't need to initiate the services myself in CI. Of course, IBM Bob has removed the service initiation from my CI. Migration Commit

I wasn't satisfied with the result, as it turned out that the tests were not stopping. I provided the documentation on how Aspire Tests work. The best part is IBM Bob calling it using MCP.

It's showing good progress, but I'm still not satisfied yet. I asked to read the log. IBM Bob was calling Playwright to read the link and download the logs. Which is looking good.

However, I believe overall it is good. Even the test CI became indefinite. It seems more related to my config or an existing issue, not the migration result itself.