CAPA: Agentic Capabilities Manager

CAPA is a powerful capabilities manager for AI agents that allows you to define skills and tools, manage credentials, and seamlessly integrate with agents like Cursor and Claude.

Why CAPA?

AI agents need two things to be useful: knowledge of when and how to act, and the ability to actually do it. Most setups treat these separately — tools are wired up in one place, instructions scattered somewhere else. CAPA brings them together as a single unit called a capability.

• Skills provide the knowledge — markdown documents that give an agent context, instructions, and decision-making guidance for a specific task.
• Tools provide the ability — executable functions the agent calls to interact with the world: APIs, shell commands, file operations, and more.

A tool without knowledge leaves the agent unsure when to use it. Knowledge without tools leaves the agent unable to act. CAPA pairs them declaratively in a single capabilities.yaml file that you can version-control, share across a team, and reproduce on any machine.

Features

• 🔌 Single MCP server that proxies only the necessary tools
• ⚡ Dynamic on-demand tool loading
• 🖥️ Expose shell commands as MCP tools
• 💻 Run any configured tool from the terminal with capa sh
• 🔑 Credential management via interactive UI or .env file
• 🛡️ Security controls (blocked phrases, character sanitization)
• 📦 Compatible with skills.sh
• 🤖 Supports Cursor and Claude plugin installation
• 🔒 Installation of skills and plugins from private repositories (GitHub and GitLab)
• 🧠 Self-improving agents
• 🎯 Default argument values for MCP tools
• 🔧 CLI prerequisite verification before installation

Installation

macOS and Linux:

curl -LsSf https://capa.infragate.ai/install.sh | sh

Windows:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://capa.infragate.ai/install.ps1 | iex"

Quick Start

1. Initialize your project

cd your-project
capa init

This creates a capabilities.yaml file where you define your agent's tools and skills.

2. Define your capabilities

providers:
  - cursor

skills:
  - id: web-researcher
    type: inline
    def:
      content: |
        ---
        name: web-researcher
        description: Search the web for information
        ---
        Use the brave.search tool to find current information online.
    requires:
      - "@brave.search"

servers:
  - id: brave
    type: mcp
    description: Brave web search
    def:
      cmd: npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-brave-search
      env:
        BRAVE_API_KEY: ${BraveApiKey}

tools:
  - id: search
    type: mcp
    description: Search the web using Brave Search
    def:
      server: "@brave"
      tool: brave_web_search

3. Install and launch

capa install

CAPA installs your skills, starts the capability server, and automatically registers with your MCP client (Cursor, Claude Desktop).

4. Run tools from the terminal

capa sh                                  # list all available commands
capa sh brave                            # list brave subcommands
capa sh brave search --query "…"         # run a tool directly

capa sh turns every configured tool into a CLI command. MCP tools are exposed as server_name.tool_name and grouped under their server ID in the CLI. Command tools appear at the top level (or under a custom group). Any unrecognised command is passed through to the OS shell.

Documentation

For complete guides, examples, and API reference, visit:

https://capa.infragate.ai

License

MIT