Use AI coding agents

Aspire provides a first-class setup experience for AI coding agents. Run aspire agent init in your project and your AI assistant — whether it's GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or another MCP-compatible tool — can immediately understand, build, debug, and monitor your distributed applications.

Why Aspire for coding agents

Aspire gives coding agents the same visibility into your running application that a developer has. The resource data, structured logs, and distributed traces you see in the Aspire Dashboard are exposed to agents through the Aspire MCP server and the Aspire CLI. Whether a person is debugging in the dashboard or an agent is diagnosing through MCP, they see the same picture.

The Aspire CLI is built for agent-driven workflows — every command works non-interactively to not block and prompts and supports --format Json for structured plain text output. Key commands include aspire start (background execution), aspire start --isolated (parallel worktrees), aspire wait (block until healthy), aspire describe, aspire logs, and aspire docs search.

The Aspire skill file (installed by aspire agent init) teaches agents all of these patterns automatically.

Get started

When you create a new Aspire project with aspire new or aspire init, you're prompted to configure AI agent environments. You can also run aspire agent init at any time to set up or update the configuration.

1
Open a terminal in your Aspire project directory (the folder containing your AppHost).
2
Run the following command:
```
aspire agent init
```
3
Select the components you want to configure:
- Aspire skill file (recommended) — teaches your AI agent how to use Aspire CLI commands
- Playwright CLI — enables browser automation for testing web resources
- Aspire MCP server — gives your AI agent runtime access to resources, logs, and traces

What gets configured

The aspire agent init command detects your AI development environment and creates the appropriate configuration files:

Aspire skill file

The skill file teaches your AI coding agent how to work with Aspire. It includes a CLI command reference, key workflows (starting apps, debugging issues, adding integrations), and important rules to follow. The file is created in the format your agent expects:

The skill file guides your agent on how to:

Start and manage your Aspire application (aspire start, aspire stop, aspire describe)
Debug issues using structured logs and distributed traces
Add integrations with aspire add and search documentation with aspire docs
Use resource MCP tools for database queries and other resource-specific operations

Aspire MCP server

The MCP server gives your AI agent direct runtime access to your running Aspire application — resource status, logs, traces, and commands. See Aspire MCP server for configuration details, available tools, and the security model.

Migrate from AGENTS.md

If your project has an AGENTS.md file from a previous version of Aspire, you can migrate to the new skill file format. The skill file provides better structure and is recognized natively by AI coding agents.

1
Run aspire agent init and select Install Aspire skill file.
2
The skill files are created at .github/skills/aspire/SKILL.md and .claude/skills/aspire/SKILL.md.
3
Review and delete the old AGENTS.md file — the skill file replaces it.

Tip

The skill file is more structured than AGENTS.md and includes a complete CLI command reference table, workflow patterns, and rules that the agent follows automatically. You can customize it for your project's specific needs.

Your first prompts

Once configured, start your preferred AI coding environment. Try asking your agent:

"Start the Aspire app and show me the resource status."

"Analyze HTTP request performance for my API."

"Add a Redis cache to my AppHost."

VS Code

The aspire agent init command supports the following AI assistants:

VS Code with GitHub Copilot
Copilot CLI
Claude Code
OpenCode

Note

The Aspire MCP server uses the STDIO transport protocol and may work with other agentic coding environments that support this MCP communication protocol.