Configure with Claude skills

Helix ships a set of Claude Code skills with the core image to help you configure your deployment. Open your Helix directory in Claude Code and the skills are available as /-commands that walk you through common tasks — grounded in the real Helix files and fields, not generic advice.

How they arrive

The skills are core-owned and travel with the helixCore image, so every deployment gets the current set:

1. They are baked into the image at build time.
2. helixctl deploy <bundle>.tar materialises them into .claude/skills/ next to your helix-config/ — the directory where you manage your domain files. (Best-effort: if the image isn’t pulled yet, they install on the next deploy after helixctl pull.)

There is nothing to install by hand and no client-repo change — they update whenever you move to a newer core.

Using a skill

Run Claude Code from your Helix deploy directory (the one holding helix-config/), then invoke a skill by name, for example:

/customer-icons  add a yellow van icon for the RSS resource type

Claude follows the skill’s steps — which files to edit, the naming conventions, the domain field to set — and makes the change in context. Type / to see the available skills.

Available skills

• customer-icons — add or brand a map/marker icon: where the PNG lives in your client repo, the name convention, and how to point a resource or stop type at it via helix.icon (including colour-branding a silhouette per livery).
• customer-icon-artwork — draw the icon itself: SVG masters for vehicle markers and incident glyphs, framed so the map tile’s status bar and badges stay clear, with build/check scripts.
• domain-stop-styling — style stops from the domain: per-state colours and labels, clientStates vs display values, time-band colour arrays (and the "null" leave-alone band), and the off-duty roster shift periods (std/dueOn/late/noShow) with their thresholds and boundary actions — plus the gotchas that catch every new domain (JSONC stream format, fail-open expression names, band ordering).

More configuration skills are added over time and arrive automatically with each core release.

Adding your own (client teams)

If you maintain a client extension (see Develop a client extension), you can add project-specific skills in your own repo under .claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md — a folder with a SKILL.md whose frontmatter gives a name and a one-line description (what it’s for), followed by the steps. Client-local skills sit alongside the core-shipped ones. To contribute a skill to the shared core set so every client gets it, raise it with your Honeywick contact.