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 — commands support non-interactive execution to avoid blocking on prompts, and many commands support --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.

Aspire workflow skills installed by aspire agent init teach agents these patterns automatically.

For skill installation paths, skill locations, companion tools, and the full skill list, see Aspire skills.

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.

Open a terminal in your Aspire project directory (the folder containing your AppHost).
Run the following command:
Aspire CLI
```
aspire agent init
```
Select the skill locations, skills and tools, and optional MCP server configuration for the agent environments you use.

For details about skill locations, workflow skills, Playwright CLI, and dotnet-inspect, see Aspire skills.

What gets configured

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

Aspire skill files

Aspire skill files teach your AI coding agent how to use Aspire CLI workflows, route tasks to focused skills, and call selected companion tools such as Playwright CLI or dotnet-inspect.

For the full skill bundle contents and installation details, see Aspire skills.

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. Skill files provide better structure and are recognized natively by AI coding agents.

Run aspire agent init and select the Aspire workflow skills you want to install.
The skill files are created under each selected skill location, such as .agents/skills/aspire/SKILL.md and .agents/skills/aspire-orchestration/SKILL.md.
Review and delete the old AGENTS.md file — the skill files replace it.

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.”

Supported AI assistants

The aspire agent init command supports the following AI assistants:

VS Code with GitHub Copilot
Copilot CLI
Claude Code
OpenCode