A .NET brain transplant for your AI coding assistant

What it does

dotnet-skills is a plugin/skill pack that injects opinionated, battle-tested .NET engineering knowledge into AI coding assistants. It ships 30 skills covering Akka.NET, C# language patterns, EF Core, Aspire, testing, and performance, plus 5 specialist agents (concurrency, performance analysis, benchmark design, Akka.NET, DocFX) that get invoked when the assistant detects relevant work. It works with Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and OpenCode.

The interesting bit

The core philosophy is “retrieval-led reasoning over pretraining” — instead of trusting whatever stale .NET knowledge lives in the model’s weights, the assistant consults curated skill documents by name. There’s even a dotnet-slopwatch skill specifically for detecting LLM-generated anti-patterns, which is a nice touch: a tool for cleaning up after your other tools.

Key highlights

• 30 skills spanning Akka.NET, modern C#, EF Core, Aspire, DI/configuration, and testing (Testcontainers, Playwright, snapshot testing)
• 5 domain-specialist agents, including a benchmark designer and a concurrency/deadlock analyst
• Strong opinions baked in: immutability by default, sealed types, no AutoMapper, no reflection-heavy frameworks
• Router snippets for CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md so downstream repos consistently invoke the right skills
• A compressed skill index you can regenerate with scripts/generate-skill-index-snippets.sh

Caveats

• “Battle-tested” is the author’s claim; the README doesn’t show examples of the actual skill content, so quality per-skill is unverifiable from here
• Setup for Copilot and OpenCode is manual copy-paste of skill files, and OpenCode requires directory names to match frontmatter — fiddly glue work
• The Akka.NET coverage is unusually deep, which tracks with the author’s background but may be dead weight if you don’t use actors

Verdict

Worth installing if you do serious .NET work with an AI assistant and are tired of it suggesting abstract classes and AutoMapper. Skip it if you’re not in the .NET ecosystem — this is laser-targeted.