Installing the dbt skill

All of this can be accomplished using only the dagster-expert skill, it knows a good deal about dbt, in particular how dbt relates to Dagster. But the dbt skill gives the agent deeper context about dbt such as model patterns, schema YAML, ref() and source() usage, dbt commands.

With both skills, the agent can know about DbtProjectComponent for Dagster and dbt specifics when necessary. This will make more sense when we discuss skill chaining.

Installation is the same regardless of which AI coding agent you use and should look familiar from when we discussed installing the Dagster skill.

Claude Code

In Claude Code, install the dbt skill from the plugin marketplace:

/plugin marketplace add dbt-labs/dbt-mcp

Once installed, confirm it's enabled:

/plugin

Switch to the Installed tab and verify that the dbt skills show as enabled. You should see entries like:

• dbt:using-dbt-for-analytics-engineering: enabled
• dbt:running-dbt-commands: enabled

Codex, Cursor, Copilot

Install using the npx skills command:

npx skills add dbt-labs/dbt-mcp

Confirm the dbt skills appear in your skill list and are enabled. You want at least dbt:using-dbt-for-analytics-engineering available.

You're set

Once the dbt skill is installed, you'll invoke it directly in your prompts. In the next section you'll use it to scaffold the dbt project alongside the Dagster integration.