Skills and plugins

The MCP server gives your AI agent access to your Holistics workspace. Holistics skills teach the agent how to use that access well: how to explore datasets, write AQL, build visualizations, and develop AML. They're published as plugins in the holistics/skills repository.

These plugins are for your own agent, such as Claude or Cursor. To extend Holistics' built-in AI instead, see AI Skills.

Available plugins

Each plugin bundles skills for one kind of work. Install the ones that match how you use Holistics.

Plugin	Use it when
holistics-development	You develop your AMQL project with a coding agent such as Claude Code or Codex. See Local agentic development.
holistics-reporting	You want to ask data questions on published datasets and dashboards with a general agent such as Claude.ai or ChatGPT.
holistics-migrate-power-bi	You're migrating a Power BI semantic model and reports to a Holistics AMQL project. Pair it with holistics-development.
analytics	You want generic analytics workflows (data exploration, analysis, reporting) that aren't tied to Holistics.
analytics-finance	You work with finance and SaaS metrics, such as lifetime value and unit economics.

Install

Install Holistics skills as a plugin whenever your agent supports plugins, since plugins also get versioning and updates. Each agent's setup page covers it:

• Claude Web
• Claude Desktop
• Claude Code
• ChatGPT
• Cursor

For agents without plugin support, copy the skill files from the plugins/<plugin-name>/skills/ folders in holistics/skills into your agent's skills or instructions.

Choose who writes AQL and visualizations

When your agent needs a query or a chart, it can either hand the task to Holistics AI or write it itself. The holistics-development and holistics-reporting plugins let you choose with the AQL & Viz authoring option.

How each option works

• holistics-ai (default): your agent calls the generate_aql and generate_viz MCP tools. These run Holistics AI sub-agents that write the AQL or visualization and return it to your agent. Like other Holistics AI usage, they're billed through your AI models setup: AI credits on Holistics-managed models, or your own provider on BYOK.
• self: your agent writes AQL and visualizations itself, using the AQL and visualization references bundled in the plugin. It then checks its work with tools that don't use Holistics AI, such as validate_aql. That usage is billed by your agent's provider (for example, your Claude plan) instead.

Tools that only read or run things, like list_datasets, execute_aql, or search_dashboards, don't use Holistics AI under either option.

Set it up

This option requires holistics-development 0.9.0 or later, or holistics-reporting 0.2.0 or later. You can set it in Claude Code: see Configure AQL & Viz authoring.

Trade-offs of having your agent write them

Writing AQL and visualizations in your agent has a few costs worth weighing:

• Larger context window: the AQL and visualization instructions stay in your agent's context for the whole session. Holistics AI sub-agents work in their own scoped context, so they don't add to your agent's context.
• Less efficient prompt caching: the generate_aql and generate_viz sub-agents are tuned to get the most out of prompt caching. Your agent might use more tokens to do the same work.