| name | modal-basic-skills |
| description | Foundational Modal platform knowledge for auto-research agents. Covers app structure, function types, CLI usage, deployment patterns, and development workflow. This skill auto-triggers when code imports `modal` and provides the base layer that the GPU-specific research skills build on.
|
Modal Basics for Auto-Research
Foundational Modal platform knowledge for research agents. Covers how Modal apps work, the CLI, and development patterns. The GPU-specific skills (modal-gpu-dev, modal-gpu-experiment, sub-agents) build on these basics.
Modal is a serverless platform for AI/ML workloads — scalable compute (including GPUs) with minimal configuration, pay only for what you use.
Documentation
Modal's documentation is outlined at https://modal.com/llms.txt.
The docs are divided into three sections:
- Fetch Guide pages for in-depth explanations of Modal features, primitives, and workflows
- Fetch Examples pages to see how different AI applications look on Modal
- Fetch API Reference pages for signatures and docstrings for components of the Python SDK
For broader context, https://modal.com/llms-full.txt aggregates all docs in a single very large file. Do not read this into your main context.
Getting up to date
You have significant knowledge about Modal from your training data but may not be aware of new features or recent changes to the API. Fetching relevant docs while planning can help you discover the most up-to-date way to accomplish a task on Modal.
The Modal CLI provides a modal changelog command that can also be useful for learning about recent changes. There are several options for querying change sets. E.g., running modal changelog --since DATE will show all changes made between that date (e.g., your knowledge cutoff) and the release of the SDK version that is in use.
Run modal --version to see the SDK version that is in use. Note that the online docs may reference features that are available only in recent SDKs.
Using the CLI
The modal CLI can be used to run or deploy code, manage resources, and observe running Apps. It is a key tool for interacting with Modal.
Run modal --help to see all available CLI commands.
You can see more detailed information about each command by running modal [command] --help. If you are unsure of how to accomplish a task through the CLI (or if you get an error when trying), read the --help rather than guessing.
Tip: most CLI commands accept a --json flag to make their output more easily parseable, e.g. with jq.
More information
When authoring Modal App code, the following references will be useful:
- ./references/app-structure.md
- ./references/function-types.md
- ./references/development-workflow.md
