The SAP AI Skills Library (skills.cloud.sap) is SAP's public catalog of installable AI skills — markdown knowledge packages that teach AI assistants how to do repeatable tasks, installable with a single command. It marks a notable shift: the "skills" concept that coding agents like Claude Code made popular now has an official, SAP-operated home, and the two ecosystems are converging on the same file format.
This guide explains what the library is, how Joule Skills work, how installation actually happens, and how it all relates to the SAP skills catalog on this site.
What the AI Skills Library Contains
The catalog lists four kinds of items:
- Skills — a
SKILL.mdmarkdown file that teaches an assistant a repeatable task (the core item type). - Plugins — bundles of multiple skills, sometimes paired with MCP servers.
- MCP Servers — tool servers that expose external data and actions to AI agents.
- Marketplaces — curated collections grouped by product or domain.
Every item carries a source tag (SAP or third-party) and a trust tier: SAP Certified (built and maintained by SAP), Partner Verified, or Community for general contributions. At the time of writing the catalog lists well over a hundred items, with heavy coverage of ABAP (including ABAP Cloud, RAP, and CDS), CAP, Fiori/UI5, BTP operations, and a handful of Joule-specific entries such as a Joule CLI skill and a Joule A2A agent toolkit.
SAP does not host your code. The library follows a bring-your-own-repository
model: your skill lives in your public GitHub repo at
skills/<skill-slug>/SKILL.md, and the catalog links to it. Updates you push
to your repo are reflected in the listing.
How Installation Works
Each skill's detail page shows the install options available for it:
npx -y @sap/skill-install <skill-slug>
That is the CLI path. For skills targeting SAP's own assistant, there is also an "Add to Joule Work Desktop" deep link that opens the Joule Work Desktop app and installs the skill locally; a Joule Work Web option is announced as coming soon. One honest caveat: the Joule Work surfaces have been available to early-adopter customers while pre-GA, so what you can install where depends on your access — check the current SAP documentation for status.
A skill file itself starts with name and description metadata followed by the markdown instructions. If you have used agent skills with Claude Code or Codex, the shape is familiar — which is the point of the next section.
Joule Skills and Joule Agents
Inside the SAP world, "Joule Skills" are the knowledge packages that SAP's Joule assistant ecosystem loads. They pair with Joule agents, which you build in Joule Studio — SAP's environment for creating custom AI agents, apps, and workflows with governance and business context. The agent builder in Joule Studio became generally available in early 2026.
The division of labor matches what coding agents do:
- A skill teaches: "when the task involves CDS view entities, follow these patterns and conventions."
- An agent acts: it orchestrates steps, calls tools, grounds responses in documents, and uses skills as its knowledge base.
For a deeper look at the agent side, see the SAP AI agents guide.
One SKILL.md Format, Two Ecosystems
The convergence is real and worth understanding:
- Coding agents — Claude Code, ChatGPT and Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot,
Windsurf — load skills from folders containing a
SKILL.mdfile. The convention started in the coding-agent world and spread across tools. - SAP's AI Skills Library uses the same shape: a
SKILL.mdin a GitHub repo, with the installer designed to work with local coding assistants such as Claude Code as well as Joule.
That means the practical question is less "which format?" and more "which distribution channel and which runtime?" This site's catalog and the SAP library answer that differently:
| This catalog (skills.sh) | SAP AI Skills Library | |
|---|---|---|
| Operator | Community (secondsky) | SAP |
| Install command | npx skills add secondsky/sap-skills | npx -y @sap/skill-install <slug> |
| Primary targets | Coding harnesses: Claude Code, ChatGPT/Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf | Joule, plus local coding assistants such as Claude Code |
| Trust tiers | Community catalog, open source (GPL-3.0) | SAP Certified / Partner Verified / Community |
| Focus | 40 production-ready SAP development skills | Growing public directory, strong ABAP/CAP/UI5 coverage from SAP teams |
Neither replaces the other today. If you write SAP code in a coding agent, the skills.sh catalog gives you curated depth for ABAP, BTP, CAP, Fiori, HANA, and the SAP AI stack. If you are building Joule agents or want SAP-certified skills, the AI Skills Library is the official home. Many teams will end up using both — the same SKILL.md knowledge in different runtimes.
Submitting Your Own Skill
The library accepts third-party contributions at the Community tier. The process, per SAP's tutorial:
- Put your skill in a public GitHub repository as
skills/<your-slug>/SKILL.mdwith a short, lowercase, hyphenated slug. - Test it locally with the
npx -y @sap/skill-installcommand. - Open a "Register a New Skill" issue in the library's GitHub repository; a maintainer reviews and onboards it.
Author and license information can live in your repo's README, LICENSE, or package.json — the catalog surface itself only needs the skill file.
Where This Leaves SAP Developers
The skills ecosystem now spans both sides of your toolchain: the coding harness where you write code (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf — often inside VS Code) and SAP's own agent platform. The format convergence means knowledge you package once travels further than it used to.
To go deeper from here:
- Browse the SAP AI skills this catalog provides for AI Core, the Generative AI Hub, and the Cloud SDK for AI — or grab the full catalog.
- Read about SAP AI Core if you are building on the services those skills target.
- See the SAP MCP server guide for the tool-server side of the same ecosystem, and how Joule and Claude Code can be orchestrated together.