Skills – Making AI coding tools aware of government standards

Name: Skills – Making AI coding tools aware of government standards
Availability: InStock
Author: aschuth

by aschuth·Feb 20, 2026·6 points·1 comment

Visit Project View on HN

AI Analysis

●●●BangerBig BrainSolve My ProblemZero to One

Standards-as-Markdown that auto-load into Claude, Copilot, Cursor — no plugin engineering required.

Strengths

•Elegant decoupling: policy experts write Markdown, AI tools consume it—removes developer friction entirely.
•Solves a real pain point: unawareness of standards beats non-compliance; activated contextually, not buried.
•Open standard adopted by major AI coding tools; 38 Dutch government skills live in marketplace today.

Weaknesses

•Marketplace currently Claude-specific, limiting practical adoption across tool ecosystems despite standard openness.
•Onboarding and discoverability unclear—how do teams know which skills exist or maintain them over time?

Post Description

I work as an engineer at the Dutch government. We have hundreds of technical standards that developers should follow when building government software: API design rules, messaging protocols, authentication profiles, accessibility requirements. The problem is that most developers don't know these standards exist until someone reviews their code (if at all).

Skills are Markdown files that inject domain knowledge into AI coding tools. When a developer starts building an API, the tool automatically loads the relevant standard. No plugins to write, no code. Just structured knowledge in Markdown.

I built a marketplace (https://github.com/MinBZK/overheid-claude-plugins) with now 38 skills covering Dutch government standards. Skills are an open standard (https://agentskills.io/) adopted by Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and others.

The interesting part, certainly for a government: you don't have to be a developer to write a skill. A policy officer who knows the standard can structure it in Markdown and suddenly every developer using these tools gets that knowledge for free.