I'm a business owner and site builder, not a developer. But with the right setup, I can also build Drupal modules, run accessibility audits, and contribute patches to open source projects. Not because I suddenly learned to code, but because I was able to leverage and build Skills and MCPs teach AI how Drupal, Zivtech, and I actually work — the coding standards, the contribution workflow, the strict conventions that experienced Drupal developers carry around in their heads, as well as the client-focus and broad vision needed to handle engagements from small (Besides Zivtech, I own Milk Jawn, an ice cream manufacturer and retailer in Philadelphia) to enterprise.
This session covers how to use and build two things:
- Skills. Markdown files, as well as structured knowledge packages: a folder with a
SKILL.mdat the center, plus scripts, data files, YAML manifests, CI validation, and whatever the skill needs to focus on the task at hand. Skills give AI agents domain expertise: your coding standards, your development workflow, your organizational knowledge, your and your client's business rules. - Model Context Protocol (MCP) — an open protocol that connects AI tools to real services. Jira, Drupal.org, your local DDEV environment. It's the difference between an AI that knows things and an AI that can do things.
Together, Skills and MCPs turn a generic large language model (LLM) into something closer to a fine-tuned model, without the retraining: a model that knows how to work with Drupal and the open source ecosystem, not just write code that looks like Drupal.
In this session I'll talk a bit more about what skills and MCPs are, I'll walk through real examples from how we actually work at Zivtech (and my ice cream manufacturing/retail business Milk Jawn): organization-wide skills for coding standards, accessibility testing, and development workflow. In addition we've developed skills for business skills like writing and style guides, shift planning, scheduling, and financial planning.
The session wraps with how to build your own skills, what's happening in the growing Drupal skills ecosystem, and a look at Joyus AI — an open source platform we're building for managing AI agents and skills across teams (Because individual skills are easy. Managing them across an organization, with guardrails, is the harder problem.)
You'll leave with a clear picture of what's possible today and enough to start building skills for your own projects.
