TL;DR: I built Stacks Skills — a set of skill files for AI agents and LLMs that corrects the most common (and costly) misconceptions about building on Stacks. It's free, open source, and you can install it in your AI tool in one line.
The Problem: Your AI Doesn't Know Stacks
Ask any popular LLM to help you build a dApp on Stacks. Here's what you'll get:
// What the AI suggests:
const wallet = "MetaMask"; // ❌ Wrong
const address = "0x123..."; // ❌ Wrong
const gasCost = "$5.00"; // ❌ Wrong
const lang = "Solidity"; // ❌ Wrong
const lib = "ethers.js"; // ❌ Wrong
Every single line is wrong. Not a little off — completely wrong.
LLMs were trained on a world dominated by Ethereum patterns. When they encounter Stacks, they pattern-match to Ethereum and hallucinate confidently. The result? Broken code, hours of debugging, and developers giving up on Stacks before they even write their first define-public.
The reality looks like this:
// The truth:
const wallet = "Hiro Wallet"; // ✅
const address = "SP3FGQ..."; // ✅ SP... mainnet / ST... testnet
const gasCost = "$0.0001"; // ✅ fractions of a cent
const lang = "Clarity"; // ✅ decidable LISP — not Solidity
const lib = "Stacks.js"; // ✅
What I Built: Stacks Skills
Stacks Skills is a collection of structured knowledge files — called skills — that you can feed directly into AI agents, Claude Code plugins, Cursor rules, or any tool that supports context injection.
Each skill covers a specific topic in the Stacks ecosystem and is written in a format optimized for LLM consumption: precise, corrective, and unambiguous.
19 Skills Covering the Full Ecosystem
| Skill | What It Fixes |
|---|---|
| 🌐 Why Stacks | Bitcoin L2, not another EVM chain |
| 💻 Clarity | Decidable LISP — no reentrancy, no surprises |
| ⚠️ Common Mistakes |
. prefix, response types, (ok ...) patterns |
| 🔒 Security | Post-conditions, access control, vulnerabilities |
| 👛 Wallets | Hiro Wallet / Leather — not MetaMask |
| 🪙 Tokens | SIP-010 — not ERC-20 |
| 🖼️ NFTs | SIP-009 — not ERC-721 |
| ₿ sBTC | Threshold signatures — not wrapped BTC |
| 📈 Stacking | Earn Bitcoin by locking STX — not staking |
| 📛 BNS | Bitcoin Name System — not ENS |
| ⛽ Gas & Costs | Fractions of a cent — no gas auctions |
| 📄 Contracts | Verified addresses — never hallucinate |
| 🖥️ Frontend | Stacks.js + Hiro SDK — not ethers.js |
| 🧰 Clarinet | Local dev — required, not optional |
| 🚀 Ship | End-to-end dApp guide |
| ⛏️ Mining | Proof of Transfer — not PoW |
| 💰 Tokenomics | 1.818B STX max supply, mechanics |
| ⚡ Nakamoto | ~200ms blocks, faster finality |
| 🔒 BTC Finality | Bitcoin-anchored security model |
How to Install
For Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add developerfred/stacksskills
/plugin install stacksskills
For Any AI Agent (universal)
Install the skill at:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/developerfred/stacksskills/master/SKILL.md
For Cursor / Windsurf / Copilot
Drop the raw skill content into your .cursorrules or system prompt context. Each skill file is a standalone markdown document optimized for this exact use case.
Why "Skills"?
The skills format emerged from the AI agent ecosystem as a pattern for injecting domain knowledge into LLM workflows. Instead of hoping the model knows the right answer, you give it the right answer upfront — structured, precise, ready to use.
Stacks is niche enough that most LLMs have poor coverage of it. But the ecosystem is rich and growing fast: sBTC is live, Nakamoto upgrade shipped, and more developers are building Bitcoin-native applications than ever. The problem isn't the ecosystem — it's that our AI tools haven't caught up.
Stacks Skills bridges that gap.
The Biggest Misconceptions I Wanted to Kill
1. "Clarity is like Solidity"
Clarity is a decidable language. You can statically analyze what a Clarity contract will do before you deploy it. No surprises. No reentrancy. No recursion. It's closer to a functional language (think LISP) than anything in the EVM world.
2. "sBTC is just wrapped Bitcoin"
sBTC uses threshold signatures — a cryptographic multi-party scheme where a decentralized signer set controls the BTC peg. There's no custodian. There's no bridge contract holding your BTC. The trust model is fundamentally different from wBTC or any wrapped asset.
3. "Stacks is expensive"
Transactions on Stacks cost fractions of a cent. No gas auctions, no fee spikes during congestion. It's one of the cheapest smart contract environments on any L2.
4. "Use 0x addresses"
Stacks uses a completely different address format: SP... for mainnet, ST... for testnet. This is a bech32-derived format. If your AI is generating 0x addresses for Stacks, it has no idea what it's doing.
Contributions Welcome
This is an open project. If you spot a gap — a skill topic that's missing, a misconception I haven't addressed, or just something the AI community gets wrong about Stacks — open an issue. I'll take care of it quickly.
📦 GitHub: github.com/developerfred/stacksskills
🌐 Web: stacks-skills.vercel.app
The goal is simple: make it so that any developer, using any AI tool, can build on Stacks correctly — from day one.
If this saved you time, drop a ⭐ on the repo. It helps the project get discovered by more Stacks builders.
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