Agent skills#

The package ships three agent skills (the AgentSkills format): instructions that a coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex...) loads when your request matches, so that it knows how to run, configure, fix and migrate this package. dbt installs them into your project when you run dbt deps.

Skill	Use it to
`using-dbt-project-evaluator`	run `dbt check`, check only the resources you changed, set severity or disable a check, change thresholds, exclude packages or paths, accept violations with exceptions and run the checks in CI
`fixing-dbt-project-evaluator-violations`	fix the violations that `dbt check` reports: one check at a time, with a recipe per rule (descriptions, tests, freshness, contracts, staging models, moves and renames, materializations), a scoped re-run to prove each fix, and a question before any change that touches many files
`migrating-dbt-project-evaluator-to-v2`	migrate a project from version 1: it runs the migration script, converts the exceptions seed, helps you handle what could not be translated, updates the CI and verifies the result

The skills contain no secret and run nothing by themselves: the agent follows them with the tools you give it, and asks you before accepting a violation or making a change that touches many files.

Install#

Tell dbt which agent you use, in your dbt_project.yml (a single value or a list):
dbt_project.yml
```
flags:
  ai_provider: claude        # claude, cursor, codex, openai, gemini or wizard
```
You can also pass it for one run: dbt deps --ai-provider claude.
Install or update the package, then run dbt deps:
packages.yml
```
packages:
  - package: dbt-labs/dbt_project_evaluator
    version: [">=2.0.0", "<3.0.0"]
```
```
dbt deps
```
dbt prints Installing using-dbt-project-evaluator (dbt_project_evaluator) -> .claude/skills for each skill.

Without ai_provider, dbt deps warns that it found skills and installs none.

dbt copies the skills (it does not link them): into .claude/skills/ for Claude Code, and into .agents/skills/ for the other agents. Every dbt deps brings the copies up to date with the installed version of the package. The copies are generated: do not edit them, and add them to your .gitignore like dbt_packages/ if you prefer not to commit them. Skills that you wrote yourself in these folders are never touched.

Turn them off#

Disable all the skills of the package, or a single one, in your dbt_project.yml; the next dbt deps removes the copies that dbt installed:

dbt_project.yml

skills:
  dbt_project_evaluator:
    +enabled: false                                  # all the skills of the package
    # or
    migrating-dbt-project-evaluator-to-v2:
      +enabled: false                                # just this one

Disabling the skills does not remove the AiProviderUnset warning of dbt deps if ai_provider is not set. If you use no agent and don't want the warning, set ai_provider anyway, together with +enabled: false: nothing is installed and nothing is reported.

Use them#

Ask your agent in plain words, for example "migrate this project to dbt_project_evaluator 2", "fix the undocumented models", "run the evaluator on the models I changed" or "accept the violation of fct_root_models for dim_calendar". The agent picks the matching skill from its description.