Skip to content

Using ryl with AI agents

ryl is built for programmatic use (stable exit codes, machine-readable output, --fix/--diff, ryl format, stdin), so AI coding agents can drive it directly. This page points to the agent-facing resources; the rest of these docs (start with Quick start) cover the CLI itself.

The ryl Agent Skill

Install the cross-tool Agent Skill so an agent learns the correct ryl invocation and config patterns:

gh skill install owenlamont/ryl ryl --agent claude-code --scope user

Swap --agent for cursor, codex, antigravity, github-copilot, and others (run gh skill install --help for the full list); or run gh skill search ryl to discover it. The skill is the canonical, tightened agent reference; this page only links to it.

Prompting in AGENTS.md

If a repo has an AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md), a one-line nudge helps agents reach for ryl and avoid its main gotcha:

Lint YAML with ryl check and format it with ryl format. check has no default-on rules, so make sure ryl.toml enables rules first, or pass --enable <RULES>; otherwise it exits 2.

--disable <RULES> subtracts from the lint selection; --exclude <GLOBS> replaces configured exclusions. Both accept comma-separated values once per command. Strict lint mode can also be configured with TOML [lint] strict = true; --no-strict overrides configuration, and --no-warnings suppresses warnings and their failing status.

Formatting defaults to two-space indentation; set top-level indent-width to keep another width. format --disable suppresses lint conflict warnings without disabling formatting passes. For syntax repair and encoded diff exit codes, use the formatter guarantees and diff guidance.

Feeding the docs to an LLM

The docs site publishes llmstxt.org files for agents that fetch documentation live (Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code, Windsurf):

https://ryl-docs.pages.dev/llms.txt        # index: links + one-line summaries
https://ryl-docs.pages.dev/llms-full.txt   # the full docs concatenated in one file

No MCP server

ryl is a CLI an agent can shell out to, so it intentionally ships no MCP server (as with ruff, Biome, and Prettier). The skill plus llms.txt cover the agent use case.