Descope Skills: Let AI Agents Handle Auth Heavy Lifting

Avi Glozman
Customer Success Engineer

AI is everywhere in software development, but most engineers are still skeptical about agents. According to the Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey, 84% of developers use or plan to use basic AI tools in their workflows, yet over half don’t use AI agents at all. The most-cited concern is accuracy: can developers really trust AI to deliver functional, secure code at scale?

Nowhere is this more true than in authentication and identity. Many teams find that agent-built authentication can lead to broken logins, security problems, scaling challenges, and technical debt that shows up long after the first version is released.

Descope Skills give agents the specialized knowledge to build identity systems like an expert instead of relying on generalist training data. With Descope Skills, AI agents can handle authentication, authorization, migrations, auditing, and identity workflows accurately, without needing to be reminded of auth best practices again and again.

If you want to jump straight in with Descope Skills, check out our docs, GitHub, or view them on skills.sh.

How agents use skills

Interacting with developer tools through AI coding agents is becoming more common, and that means the systems around those agents matter more than they used to. It’s possible that even with asking, an LLM has searched the web to answer a question you had about something that wasn’t included in its training data. That ability comes from the interface, the harness, which exposes tools under the hood like web search and command-line access to agents.

At its most basic level, an agent is an LLM plus its configuration. Models like Claude Sonnet or GPT-5 become agents when paired with instructions, context, and tools that shape how they work.

The harness is the room the agent lives in: windows let it see outside (interact with the web), a pen and paper let it write (edit files, code, or use the command line), and books provide something to reference (MCP servers, training data, skills). Think of it as a workspace with everything the agent needs to actually do things, not just talk about them.

However, teaching agents the same tasks over and over in different projects is inefficient. It’s a waste of time, and a waste of tokens. Many developers use different models and agents for different tasks, which leads to scattered memory and inconsistent understanding across projects and codebases.

To address these challenges, Agent Skills package small, reusable knowledge sets that teach agents how certain systems, workflows, and tools work. Traditionally, developers might need to start a new session due to a shrinking context window. Skills equip agents with plug-and-play domain expertise that works across different projects, environments, and sessions.

Rather than re-explaining how your auth system works, you give the agent something it can reference every time: Descope Skills.

Descope Skills

LLMs are generalists by default. They can produce auth code that looks right, but it’s built on training data that includes deprecated libraries, five-year-old tutorials, and GitHub repos of dubious quality. What AI produces in its default state is a reflection of the code that’s out there: most is average, some is questionable, and a very small portion is genuinely great.

Without guardrails and big neon signs guiding agents toward excellence, they repeat the same mistakes engineers have been making in the last 20 years of Stack Overflow threads. The result is broken login flows, insecure JWT handling, outages, and systems that don’t scale.

Descope Skills give your agents reusable knowledge for handling authentication, authorization, migrations, auditing, and infrastructure correctly. Instead of repeating the same prompts, your agents build a stronger understanding of how to use Descope and modern identity systems.

You can find Descope Skills on our docs, GitHub, or view them on skills.sh. You can also install them instantly with:

npx skills add descope/skills

Auth and UX

These skills help agents quickly build production-ready authentication. Whether you are adding login to a new app, customizing authentication screens, or setting up detailed authorization, these skills help you avoid common mistakes and reduce extra work from the beginning.

/descope-auth

Our core skill gives your agents everything they need to jump straight into integrating Descope in new projects, or help you migrate from homegrown auth. Your prompts can reference specific login methods (like OAuth social logins) or simply ask for broad implementation.

Example prompts:

• “I’d like to add login to my app”
• “Add OAuth/SSO to my application”

/descope-byos-builder

Want to bring your own screens to Descope Flows? Now you can create React components that work out of the box, utilizing our Bring Your Own Screen functionality. This skill can create customer login screens over your Flow, or even troubleshoot existing UI elements.

Example prompts:

• “Build custom UI over my sign-in Descope Flow”
• “My login button isn’t doing anything. Fix it.”

/descope-fga-schema

Getting fine-grained authorization (FGA) right can be complex, so let your agent help you set up the schema. This skill ensures agents have all the expertise and tools needed to properly configure attribute-based access control (ABAC) and relationship-based access control (ReBAC).

Example prompts:

• “Add team-based access control”
• “Define an FGA schema with users, organizations, and resource-level permissions”

Infrastructure and auditing

These skills help teams set up identity infrastructure and review current setups for security, scalability, and easy maintenance. They also make it easier for agents to manage Descope with infrastructure-as-code and spot issues before they affect production.

/descope-terraform

Configuring your Descope projects with Terraform is even easier with this skill.

Example prompts:

• “Set up Terraform to manage my Descope project”
• “Create a Descope project with password auth and RBAC using Terraform”

/auth-review

Already built out your auth, or want to check your agent’s work? This auditing skill is platform-agnostic, so you can put a magnifying glass over both Descope-based and third-party auth systems. It’s a helpful first step if you’re considering giving Descope a try.

Example prompts:

• “Audit my auth implementation”
• “Are there any bugs in my JWT validation?”

Migration

These skills help simplify one of the hardest identity challenges: migrating away from legacy authentication platforms. Agents can analyze existing implementations, map features, and generate migration guidance that makes your path to Descope faster and smoother.

/okta-cis-to-descope

Guide your agents through migrations from Okta Customer Identity solutions to Descope. Talk migration path, see how features map, and create a plan.

Example prompts:

• “I want to switch from Okta-hosted login to Descope”
• “How do Okta CIS features map to Descope?”

/auth0-to-descope

Give your agent the expertise to plan a start-to-finish migration from Auth0. Balances Descope SDKs and Flows against the Auth0 surface, mapping your existing setup to a Descope equivalent.

Example prompts:

• “I want to migrate my codebase from Auth0 to Descope”
• “How do I replace Auth0 Actions with Descope?”

/workos-to-descope

Give your agent the tools it needs to plan and execute migrations from WorkOS to Descope. Map WorkOS or AuthKit features to Descope ones (or watch the agent find workarounds where there is no clear feature analog).

Example prompts:

• "I want to switch this app from WorkOS AuthKit to Descope"
• "How do I replace the WorkOS Admin Portal with Descope?"

Auth0 migration demo

Switching from Auth0 to a modern Descope setup involves many moving parts, which makes it the perfect scenario for Descope Skills. Our dedicated Auth0 migration skill /auth0-to-descope helps you untangle and carry over complex identity components woven into applications, frontend flows, APIs, and infrastructure.

Here’s how it works, step by step:

• Install the skill in Claude Code for the terminal:

/plugin marketplace add descope/skills
/plugin install descope-skills
/reload-skills

• With Claude Code pointed at your Auth0 app folder, ask Claude about migrating from Auth0 to Descope, or simply run /auth0-to-descope.

• Claude will first check if you have the Descope Docs MCP Server set up, and whether it works correctly. While not required, we strongly recommend this because it greatly improves accuracy for Descope-related questions.

• Once you’ve set up the Descope Docs MCP Server, Claude will ask you some questions about your use case, your existing Auth0 setup, your codebase, and other technical specifics. This provides deeper context of the migration’s scope and requirements.

• Claude will analyze your project and needs, then build a robust migration plan (MIGRATION-PLAN.md) in the root of your project directory. It will not make any changes to your existing files until you’re ready.

This plan gives Claude every detail needed to migrate from Auth0 to Descope on its own. The plan includes (but is not limited to) insights and action items like:

• A summary of scope
• Timelines (overall and per task, in terms of hours of work for a human engineer)
• Noteworthy trade-offs and considerations
• Explanations of feature differences and equivalencies
• Per-file changes and how to group these into tasks
• Required configuration changes
• User migration process (if applicable)

Descope’s migration skills are resistant to conversation-compaction. We instruct agents to track the state of the migration (in a file called MIGRATION-STATE.md), meaning that no matter what happens with your conversation history, agents will always know the initial plan, and what the progress has been so far.

Whether you migrate by hand or delegate the toughest tasks to your agents, the Auth0 migration skill ensures the process is both planned and executed meticulously. You’ll stay informed and in charge from end to end.

Skills aren’t all-or-nothing

Here’s the thing: You don’t need to be vibe-coding entire apps from scratch for Descope Skills to be useful.

Skills directly address the concern most developers have about letting agents write auth code, which is whether their output is accurate. Descope Skills provide specific, structured knowledge that constrains what the agent produces, steering it toward patterns that work in production.

Ultimately, better inputs produce better outputs. Descope Skills are how you get your agents there for identity.