For AI agents

xa ships artifacts for coding agents alongside its code. This page lists them, says where each lives in the repository, and points at the machine-readable copies of this documentation.

Skills

Skills are folders holding a SKILL.md (the Agent Skills format): a description that tells an agent when to use it and a body with the procedure. Install one into your agent with gh skill (any host: --agent claude-code, copilot, cursor, codex, gemini), or use the copy bundled in the wheel.

xa-install

Use when the user wants to install, configure, provision, secure, or troubleshoot xa — the cross-machine Claude Code session manager. Triggers on “install xa”, “set up xa on this server”, “configure xa hosts”, “start xa serve”, “xa from my phone”, “make xa accessible from my phone”, “secure xa”, “xa config”, or any request to use xa for the first time. Also use if the user asks why xa list is empty, why a remote host isn’t showing, why they can’t resume a session, or whether their xa deployment is safe.

gh skill install thorwhalen/xa xa-install --agent claude-code

Source: xa/data/skills/xa-install (bundled with the pip package).

xa-dev

Use when developing on or diagnosing the xa package (Claude Code session manager). Triggers on work under /root/py/proj/t/xa, edits to xa/xa/*.py, failing tests, or questions about xa’s architecture, layering, or extension points. Not for using xa as an end user — that’s the shipped xa-install skill.

Source: .claude/skills/xa-dev.

The bundled skills are also on disk after pip install xa, under the package’s data/skills/ directory; link them into an agent without network access with skill link-skills <that directory>.

Machine-readable documentation

This site publishes the same documentation in forms that fit an agent’s context window:

  • llms.txt: an index of every page with a one-line description (llms.txt format)

  • xa.md: the whole documentation as one Markdown file

  • <page>.html.md: a rendered Markdown twin of every page, advertised from each page’s <head> with <link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown">

  • objects.inv: the Sphinx inventory: a symbol-to-URL index (sphobjinv convert plain objects.inv -)