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What are Agent Skills?

Agent Skills are an open standard that gives AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, etc.) the context they need to work with specific tools and platforms. Novu’s skills provide AI agents with everything required to build multi-channel notification systems — triggering workflows, managing subscribers, integrating the in-app inbox, and configuring preferences.

Prerequisites

Setup

Install the Novu skills into your project using the skills CLI:
This pulls the skills from the novuhq/skills GitHub repository and makes them available to your AI agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, etc.).

Available Skills

Quick Routing

Use this guide to pick the right skill for your task:
  • “Send a welcome notification”trigger-notification
  • “Create subscriber”manage-subscribers
  • “Add a bell icon to my app”inbox-integration
  • “Let users opt out of emails”manage-preferences

Example prompts

Copy or open these prompts in Cursor after installing Novu skills with npx skills add novuhq/skills. Replace YOUR_* placeholders with values from your Novu dashboard.

Core skills

Send a welcome notification

Open in Cursor

Create a subscriber

Open in Cursor

Add a bell icon to my app

Open in Cursor

Configure subscriber preferences

Open in Cursor

Additional skills

These skills are available in the Novu documentation MCP and Mintlify-hosted skill packages:

Set up a code-first workflow

Open in Cursor

Design a multi-channel workflow

Open in Cursor

Configure workflow step content

Open in Cursor

Common Combinations

  • Full notification system: trigger-notification + manage-subscribers
  • In-app notifications: trigger-notification + inbox-integration
  • Complete stack: all four skills together

SDK Overview

Skill Reference

Trigger Notification

Send notifications by triggering Novu workflows. Supports single, bulk, broadcast, and topic-based delivery.

Single trigger

Bulk trigger

Send up to 100 events in a single request:

Broadcast trigger

Send to all subscribers in the environment:

Topic trigger

Send to all subscribers in a topic:
Key trigger parameters:

Manage Subscribers

Subscribers are the recipients of your notifications. Each subscriber has a unique subscriberId — typically your application’s user ID.

Create

Retrieve

Update

Delete

Bulk create

Create up to 500 subscribers in one request:
Topics are named groups of subscribers for group-based notification targeting:

Inbox Integration

Add an in-app Inbox to your web application. The Inbox provides a bell icon, notification feed, read/archive management, and real-time WebSocket updates.
HMAC Authentication is required in production to prevent subscriber impersonation. Generate the hash server-side:

Manage Preferences

Novu uses a two-level preference system: workflow defaults and subscriber overrides (set by end users). Workflow-level defaults: Workflow level defaults can be configured in the Novu Dashboard. To do so, click on the workflow you want to configure and then click on the Manage Preferences option. Subscriber-level overrides:

Workflow-level preferences

Global preferences

Preference resolution order (most specific wins):
  1. Subscriber workflow preference
  2. Subscriber global preference
  3. Workflow default
  4. System default (all channels enabled)
The Inbox component includes a built-in Preferences panel accessible via the settings icon, or use <Preferences /> as a standalone component. For additional help, check the Novu documentation or contact us at [email protected].