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.

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/order-compute ~/.claude/skills/

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@0.4.1 setup --name buy      # creates a wallet in your OS keychain
npx --yes @celo/buy@0.4.1 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.

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.