JetBrains shipped Agent Skills in IntelliJ IDEA, and the part that matters is not the feature but the governance model around it. There is a Skills Manager in AI Assistant that installs skills globally, per-project or per-agent; the agent selects relevant ones by context, or you invoke one explicitly with $skill-name under Codex and /skill-name under Claude, both reached over ACP alongside their own Junie. What they recommend for teams is the interesting sentence: “a better approach is to maintain an organization-wide Skill Repository, verified by your team, and add it to the Skill Repository list.” That is a supply-chain position, not a convenience feature — the same argument ScrapingBee makes about reviewing a third-party skill like a dependency, arrived at from the IDE side and answered with infrastructure.
They practise it. github.com/JetBrains/skills is described as a “curated agent skills collection verified by JetBrains,” and it carries 129 skills at 348 stars — one of the largest first-party verified skill collections published by any vendor. The examples in the post show what a skill can be when the author controls the runtime: ij-debugger does not explain debugging, it drives it, because “the agent can start and control a debugging session, manage breakpoints, step through the code, and collect runtime evidence.” A skill with access to the IDE’s own debugger is a category of capability nobody outside the IDE vendor can ship. Notably, MCP appears nowhere in the post — this is a skills story told entirely without it.
The catalog’s JetBrains record is 33 API pages deep on the platform side and blind to all of the above. The Agents API and Agent Pools API are build agents, not AI ones. The Automation API, Activities API and Agile Boards API are the TeamCity and YouTrack surfaces. It is a thorough record of a company that ships developer infrastructure, and it does not contain a single pointer to the 129 skills.
JetBrains scores 32.4, thin on the Kin Score — contract quality at 66.9, which is respectable, dragged down by access clarity at 15.8 and operational transparency at 10.5. Agent Readiness is 19.8, agent-aware, and agent_skills reads unlit. That reading is accurate against the registered record and wrong about the company, which makes it our gap before theirs: nothing in the catalog points at a repository that exists, is public, is first-party and is verified by its publisher. We will go register it. The broader point survives the fix, though. JetBrains built the supply chain for skills — a verified repository, an installer, an org-level override — and the discovery layer that would let anything outside the IDE know it exists is the piece still missing, on both sides.