buy-skill

Agent skills for buy — an x402 payment client for Celo that lets a CLI or AI agent pay for HTTP APIs in stablecoins.

The MCP server gives an agent the capability to pay. It does not teach it what is worth buying, how to read a lease, or how to fail safely when money is involved and a retry can charge twice. That is what these skills are for.

Skills

Skill	What it teaches
order-compute	Buying a short-lived GCP VM through the public gateway — quoting before paying, running a script or opening an SSH session, polling for results, renewing a lease, and which failures are safe to retry.
use-api-gateway	Discovering and buying APIs from the provider-neutral buy gateway — starting with X search and LinkedIn posts — while keeping provider credentials server-side and handling paid retries safely.
file-feedback	Reporting a bug, a wrong instruction, a payment problem, or an idea back to the maintainers — redacting keys and poll URLs, checking for duplicates, drafting the report for your approval, and filing it with gh or a prefilled issue URL.

Installing a skill

Skills are plain Markdown with YAML frontmatter. Copy the directory into wherever your agent looks for skills.

For Claude Code, either globally:

git clone https://github.com/celo-org/buy-skill.git
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -r buy-skill/skills/<name> ~/.claude/skills/

<name> is the directory from the table above, e.g. order-compute.

or scoped to a single project, in that project's .claude/skills/.

Prerequisite: the buy MCP server

A skill is guidance, not capability. The agent also needs the tools it describes — buy_pay_quote, buy_curl, buy_balance, buy_whoami, buy_verify_status:

npx --yes @celo/buy@0.6.0 setup --name buy      # creates a wallet in your OS keychain
npx --yes @celo/buy@0.6.0 mcp install --client all

Restart the agent afterwards so it picks up the new MCP configuration. The server signs with the keychain wallet in its own process; the agent never receives key material.

Fund the printed address with a small amount of USDC or USDT on Celo mainnet. You do not need CELO — the gateway's sponsor wallet pays the gas.

These payments are real

order-compute targets a gateway that settles real USDC or USDT on Celo mainnet. Payment is irreversible and there is no refund primitive in x402. Two consequences the skill spends most of its length on:

• Quote before paying. The request body determines the price, so a hardcoded cap breaks the moment you ask for a bigger machine.
• Never blindly retry a failed purchase. A 500 can mean the payment already went through; retrying it is a second payment. Only the 4xx and 503 refusals happen before settlement.

Fund the wallet like a float, not a treasury. Nothing prompts per payment.

Feedback

This repository is the front door for everything buy — the skills here, the CLI, the MCP server, the gateway, and payments. File it here whatever broke; maintainers route it onward.

Open an issue, or install file-feedback and let the agent draft the report for you. It searches for duplicates, fills the right form, and shows you the exact text before anything is posted.

One thing to check before you paste: a poll URL (https://usebuy.ai/google/vm/<token>) is a bearer capability. Anyone who reads it can read your result and renew your lease at your expense. Redact the token. The same goes for private keys, seed phrases, SSH private keys, and anything Self handed you. A transaction hash is already public on-chain and is the most useful thing you can include.

Other MCP clients

The skill format is Claude Code's, but nothing in the guidance is specific to it. Any MCP client gets the same buy tools; restate the skill body as a system prompt there.

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE.