PowerSkills: Giving AI Agents Control Over Windows with PowerShell

Source: Dev.to

Overview

PowerSkills is an open‑source PowerShell toolkit that gives AI agents structured control over Windows. It provides actions for Outlook email, Edge browser, desktop windows, and system operations, with every action returning clean, parseable JSON.

Features

• Outlook – Read inbox, search emails, send messages, access calendar events via COM automation.
• Browser – Control Edge via Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP): list tabs, navigate, take screenshots, interact with the DOM.
• Desktop – Manage windows, capture screenshots, read/write clipboard, send keystrokes via Win32 API.
• System – Query system info, manage processes, execute commands, read environment variables.

All actions return a consistent JSON envelope, eliminating the need for regex parsing:

{
  "status": "success",
  "exit_code": 0,
  "data": {
    "hostname": "WORKSTATION-01",
    "os": "Microsoft Windows 11 Pro",
    "memory_gb": 32
  },
  "timestamp": "2026-03-06T17:30:00Z"
}

Agents can check status, extract data, and handle errors directly.

Usage

Dispatcher mode

.\powerskills.ps1 system info
.\powerskills.ps1 outlook inbox --limit 5
.\powerskills.ps1 browser tabs
.\powerskills.ps1 desktop screenshot --path C:\temp\screen.png

Standalone mode

.\skills\system\system.ps1 info
.\skills\outlook\outlook.ps1 inbox --limit 5

Skill Metadata

Each skill includes a SKILL.md file containing structured metadata such as name, description, available actions, and parameters. This enables AI agents to discover capabilities without hard‑coded instructions.

Installation

No package manager or installer is required—just PowerShell 5.1+ on Windows 10/11.

1. Clone or download the repository.

2. Run the list command:

   .\powerskills.ps1 list

For browser skills, launch Edge with remote debugging enabled:

Start-Process "msedge.exe" "--remote-debugging-port=9222"

If scripts are blocked, set the execution policy:

Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

License & Contribution

PowerSkills is released under the MIT license. Contributions, issue reports, and stars are welcome:

github.com/aloth/PowerSkills

Call to Action

If you’re building agents that need to work with Windows, feel free to share your approaches and suggest additional Windows capabilities that would be useful for agent workflows.