AWS Core

Builds generative AI applications on Amazon Bedrock. Covers model invocation (Converse API, InvokeModel), RAG with Knowledge Bases, Bedrock Agents, Guardrails, and AgentCore. Use when invoking models, setting up Knowledge Bases, creating agents, applying guardrails, deploying to AgentCore, troubleshooting Bedrock errors (ThrottlingException, AccessDeniedException), or choosing models (Claude, Llama, Nova, Titan). ALSO USE for prompt caching setup and debugging, quota health checks and throttling diagnosis, cost attribution and tracking, migrating between Claude model generations (4.5 to 4.6 to 4.7), chunking strategies, API selection (Converse vs InvokeModel), guardrail capabilities, and model selection. Also covers AgentCore Payments setup (x402, microtransactions, Payment Manager, Connector, Instrument, Coinbase CDP, Stripe Privy, 402 Payment Required, pay for content, paid endpoint, agent payments). NOT for custom model training, Rekognition, or Comprehend.

Analyze AWS costs, find savings, manage budgets, evaluate Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, right-size EC2/Lambda/RDS/EBS with Compute Optimizer, look up service pricing, query CUR with Athena, detect cost anomalies, scope costs to billing views, and monitor Free Tier usage. Triggers on: AWS bill, cost analysis, reduce spend, savings plan, reserved instance, right-size, budget alert, cost optimization, pricing, free tier, cost anomaly, CUR, cost audit, billing view, billing view ARN.

Guides building full-stack applications with AWS Blocks — an Infrastructure-from-Code framework. Applies when creating APIs, selecting Building Blocks (KVStore, DistributedTable, Database, AuthBasic, AuthCognito, Realtime, AsyncJob, FileBucket, etc.), running local development, or deploying AWS Blocks applications. Also covers AWS Blocks topics with validated, version-specific patterns that prevent common mistakes. Triggers when user mentions AWS Blocks; project has aws-blocks/ directory; code imports @aws-blocks packages.

Authors, deploys, and troubleshoots AWS infrastructure using CDK with TypeScript or Python. Covers best practices, stack architecture, and construct patterns. Always use when writing CDK constructs, bootstrapping environments, running cdk deploy/synth/diff, fixing CDK or CloudFormation errors, planning stack structure, importing existing resources, resolving drift, or refactoring stacks without resource replacement.

Author, validate, and troubleshoot AWS CloudFormation templates. Covers template authoring with secure defaults, pre-deployment validation (cfn-lint, cfn-guard, change sets), and root-cause diagnosis of failed stacks using CloudFormation events and CloudTrail correlation.

Deploys and operates containerized workloads on ECS, Fargate, and ECR. Covers task definitions, Fargate services, ECR repository setup and lifecycle policies, ECS Exec debugging, service scaling, deployment strategies, load balancer integration, and logging configuration. Use when deploying, debugging, or optimizing containers on AWS. ALSO USE for container deployment options (ECS vs ECS Express Mode), networking modes, health check troubleshooting, OOM errors, secrets injection, blue/green deployments, ECR image management, and App Runner sunset guidance and migration. NOT for Kubernetes, EKS, or CI/CD pipelines.

Routes any task involving AWS databases — choosing, comparing, recommending, getting started with, or operating a database — to the correct service-specific skill. Supersedes general training-data knowledge with post-training service updates, corrected limitations, and decision procedures for relational (Aurora, DSQL, RDS), key-value (DynamoDB), wide-column (Keyspaces), document (DocumentDB), graph (Neptune), time-series (Timestream), and in-memory/caching (ElastiCache, MemoryDB) workloads. Activates when a user describes building an application on AWS that will store, retrieve, or manage data, even if they do not mention 'database' explicitly.

Configures CI/CD pipelines using AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodeConnections, and CodeArtifact. Covers CodePipeline V2 (triggers, variables, execution modes, cross-account), buildspec.yml (caching, VPC, Docker), CodeDeploy strategies (blue/green, canary, linear), CodeArtifact (private package registries, auth tokens, cross-account), and source connections (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket). Applies when CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodeConnections, CodeArtifact, buildspec.yml, appspec.yml, or CI/CD pipeline orchestration is referenced. Does NOT cover: ECS Fargate services or task definitions (use aws-containers), CDK Pipelines or cdk deploy (use aws-cdk), sam deploy (use aws-serverless), Amplify deployments (use aws-amplify), or GitHub Actions/GitLab CI.

Verified corrections for IAM behaviors that AI agents frequently get wrong — policy evaluation edge cases, trust policy gotchas, STS session limits, Organizations quirks, and SAML/MFA specifics. Also provides structured workflows for IAM role management and least-privilege policy generation. Covers condition operator safety (ForAnyValue/ForAllValues with Null checks for absent keys), bucket policy deny patterns (VPC endpoint restrictions, org path conditions), resource-based policy confused deputy protection, and service role creation for AWS services (Glue, CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, Firehose, DataSync, S3 replication, Lambda, Step Functions, ECS, etc.) including trust policies with aws:SourceAccount/aws:SourceArn conditions. Applies when creating or configuring IAM roles, writing IAM or bucket policies, working with STS, Organizations, condition operators, or any task requiring an IAM service role or execution role. Does not cover non-IAM authorization like Cognito user-pool policies or app-level RBAC.

Guides use of AWS messaging and streaming services. Covers Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon MQ, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Data Firehose, Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink, and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK). Use when implementing messaging and streaming patterns.