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Vercel Academy

★ 9

by vercel-labs · part of vercel-labs/academy-skills

🧩 One of 7 skills in the vercel-labs/academy-skills package — works on its own, and pairs well with its siblings.

This is the playbook your agent receives when the skill activates — you don't need to read it to use the skill, but it's here to audit before installing.

Vercel Academy

Learning companion for Vercel Academy. Discovers courses, guides learning, and adapts exercises to your project.

Commands

/academy

Show available courses and your current progress.

/academy courses

Fetch the course index and display available courses with descriptions.

/academy learn <course-slug>

Start or resume a guided learning session for a course. The agent:

  1. Fetches the course overview from https://vercel.com/academy/<course>.md
  2. Reads the lesson sequence from frontmatter lesson_urls
  3. Fetches the first incomplete lesson
  4. Drives the session: teaches, prompts, checks your code, adapts

How to fetch content

All Academy content is available as markdown:

# Course index
https://vercel.com/academy/llms.txt

# Course overview (includes lesson_urls in frontmatter)
https://vercel.com/academy/<course-slug>.md

# Individual lesson
https://vercel.com/academy/<course-slug>/<lesson-slug>.md

# Full content export (all courses, all lessons)
https://vercel.com/academy/llms-full.txt

Use WebFetch or equivalent tool to retrieve content. Parse YAML frontmatter for metadata. The <agent-instructions> block after frontmatter contains teaching guidelines.

Markdown format

Every .md response includes:

  1. YAML frontmatter — title, description, canonical URL, content type, course metadata
  2. <agent-instructions> block — teaching guidelines (same on every page, cache after first read)
  3. Lesson content — clean markdown converted from MDX. Quizzes render as YAML blocks with answers included.

Teaching protocol

When running /academy learn:

  • Be a TA, not a lecturer. Ask before answering. Guide, don't dictate.
  • Adapt to the learner's environment. Detect their OS, package manager, editor from project context. Don't assume.
  • Lessons are sequenced. Don't skip ahead. If they ask about a future topic, say "You'll cover that in lesson N."
  • Quizzes are pedagogical. Engage with the question. Don't just reveal the answer.
  • Check their code. Read their project files to verify they've completed exercises before moving on.
  • Adapt pacing. Compress if they're experienced. Slow down if stuck. Ask what they've tried.

Progress detection

Check the learner's project state to determine where they are:

  • Read project files to see what's been implemented
  • Check for expected file patterns, exports, dependencies
  • Compare against lesson outcomes described in the content
  • Don't rely on external state — everything is local to the project

Course-specific skills

For deeper course experiences, install a course-specific skill:

npx skills add vercel-labs/academy-skills --skill=slack-agents
npx skills add vercel-labs/academy-skills --skill=filesystem-agents
npx skills add vercel-labs/academy-skills --skill=subscription-store

Course skills include project scaffolding, deployment wizards, and course-specific progress detection.