How I manage skills and MCP servers across AI coding agents

Source: Dev.to

Keeping AI Coding Agents in Sync

Working with AI coding agents recently has meant switching between them more often than I expected.

• Sometimes a model hits token limits.
• Sometimes rate limits kick in.
• Sometimes a different model simply performs better for a task.

So during the same project I often move between tools like Codex, Cursor, Gemini, Claude Code, or Copilot.

Most coding agents now support roughly the same concepts:

• skills
• MCP servers
• local tools and config
• filesystem discovery

But they do not share state, which leads to practical problems:

• If I install a new MCP in one agent, I have to install it again in the other agents.
• If I update a skill, I have to make sure every agent is using the updated version.
• If I try a new agent, the entire setup has to be recreated again.

Over time the setups drift apart.

The Idea

I wanted one workspace to define the environment, with agents acting as consumers of that definition.
That became skills-sync.

skills-sync is a CLI for keeping skills and MCP configuration in one workspace and syncing that state into supported agents. Instead of treating every agent as a separate manual setup, it gives you a single source of truth.

How It Works

With skills-sync, your environment lives in a local workspace. It uses symlinks so agents point to the same underlying files instead of keeping duplicated copies around. This means:

• skills live in one place
• MCP configuration lives in one place
• updates propagate cleanly
• new agents can reuse the same setup
• switching tools no longer means rebuilding everything

Today the project supports Codex, Cursor, Gemini, Copilot, and Claude Code.

Basic Workflow

A realistic first run looks like this:

# initialize the local workspace with starter content
skills-sync init --seed

# use the default profile
skills-sync use personal

# materialize runtime output for supported agents
skills-sync sync

Adding Skills from an Upstream

skills-sync profile add-upstream --source matlab/skills
skills-sync list upstream-content --upstream matlab_skills
skills-sync profile add-skill --upstream matlab_skills --path skills/matlab-test-generator

Checking for Drift

skills-sync agents inventory
skills-sync agents drift --dry-run

Exporting / Importing a Profile

If you want to move the same setup between machines, you can export and import a profile instead of rebuilding it from memory.

Conclusion

skills-sync is still early, but the core workflow is already working well for me. If you are juggling multiple coding agents and are tired of their environments drifting apart, take a look:

• https://github.com/ryanreh99/skills-sync
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/@ryanreh99/skills-sync

Feedback or ideas are welcome.

Thanks for reading.