Catalyst by Zoho: AI Agent Skills for AI Coding Tools

Catalyst by Zoho: AI Agent Skills

Zoho has released an official set of AI agent skills for Catalyst, its full-stack serverless cloud platform, letting AI coding tools such as Claude, Gemini, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Windsurf write deployment-ready Catalyst code, recommend architecture, and manage Catalyst infrastructure directly through Zoho MCP.

What the Skills Actually Give an AI Agent

These skills give an AI coding agent deep, structured knowledge of Catalyst's platform, services, SDK patterns, and best practices, covering Functions, AppSail, Slate, Data Store, NoSQL, Stratus, Authentication, Signals, SmartBrowz, Cache, QuickML, SDKs, and Zia. Beyond just writing code, an agent equipped with these skills can recommend appropriate architecture, follow Catalyst's own best practices rather than generic assumptions, and, when connected via Zoho MCP, directly manage infrastructure such as creating tables or configuring cache.

Installing the Skills

  1. Run npx skills add catalystbyzoho/agent-skills. The installer automatically detects which AI tools you have configured and installs the skills into the correct location for each one.
  2. For Claude Code specifically, open a terminal session (not the desktop app or web interface), register the repository as a plugin marketplace source, then install the Catalyst skill plugin from that marketplace.

Connecting Zoho MCP for Infrastructure Management

To let an AI agent manage Catalyst infrastructure directly from a conversation, rather than only writing code:

  1. Go to mcp.zoho.com and create or open an MCP server.
  2. Under Tools, then Config Tools, search for Catalyst by Zoho and add it.
  3. Under Connections, set authorisation to On Demand.
  4. Copy your MCP server URL and reference it in your project's MCP configuration.
Safety design worth knowing: Development and production environments are kept genuinely separate. Code only moves to production through manual promotion; the agent itself never touches production directly. The agent authenticates with its own configurable permission set, and destructive commands are disabled by default in non-interactive mode.

Ongoing Development

This is an actively maintained, open-source repository (Apache License 2.0) with community contributions, including recently added job scheduling guidance covering cron jobs, retries, webhooks, and observability. For edge cases not covered by the bundled reference material, the skills instruct the AI agent to search Catalyst's own official documentation directly.

Need help? 1 Cloud Consultants can help you set up Catalyst's AI agent skills and Zoho MCP integration for your development workflow. Book a discovery call with 1 Cloud Consultants.