Agent Skills

ilo can be installed as a skill in Claude Code and Claude Co-work, giving any conversation the ability to write, run, and debug ilo programs on demand.

Claude Code

Install the skill

Shell

ilo skill install

This creates a skill at ~/.claude/skills/ilo/SKILL.md that Claude Code picks up automatically. Once installed, invoke it with /ilo or just mention ilo code in conversation.

What the skill provides

• Write ilo programs from natural-language descriptions
• Run inline expressions and .ilo files
• Debug errors using ilo --explain
• Convert code from other languages into ilo
• Load the full spec with ilo help ai

Example

> /ilo fibonacci function that returns the nth number

ilo 'fib n:n>n;<=n 1 n;a=fib -n 1;b=fib -n 2;+a b' 10
# 55

Manual installation

If you prefer to install the skill by hand, create ~/.claude/skills/ilo/SKILL.md:

---
name: ilo
description: "Write, run, debug, and explain programs in the ilo programming language."
argument-hint: "[task or code description]"
allowed-tools:
  - Bash
  - Read
  - Write
  - Edit
  - Grep
  - Glob
---

Then add the ilo quick reference below the frontmatter. Run ilo help ai to get the compact spec to paste in.

Claude Co-work

Claude Co-work (multi-agent coding sessions) works the same way. Once the skill is installed, any agent in the session can use ilo.

Typical Co-work patterns:

• One agent writes ilo, another tests it - split generation and verification across agents
• ilo as glue code - use ilo for data transforms between agents working on different parts of a system
• Rapid prototyping - one agent writes the ilo prototype, another converts it to production code

The skill is shared across all agents in the session via the same ~/.claude/skills/ directory.

Other agents

Any agent that can run shell commands can use ilo. The key ingredients:

1. Install ilo - curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ilo-lang/ilo/main/install.sh | sh
2. Load the spec - ilo help ai returns a compact reference the agent can use as context
3. Use JSON mode - pass -j for structured output the agent can parse (see REPL JSON Mode)

Combining with other integrations

Skills compose with MCP Servers and HTTP Tools - the agent can write ilo programs that call external services, all within a single conversation.