Agentic Skills for ABAP Development

Introduction

ABAP Development with SAP Official ABAP MCP Server is possible in VSCode and in Official ABAP MCP Server – Eclipse. We need to govern our agents to do the development and code generation according to our needs. Our needs can be simply the Clean ABAP Styleguide or the corporate ABAP Development Guideline. One thing is to use MCP Servers to create objects, another is to meet certain quality standards filling them with proper content.

Skills

Golden rules and hints packaged into reusable SKILL.MD files are the way to activate valuable context on-demand, matching the task – like ABAP Code generation – executed by agents utilizing LLMs. Such markdown files has a dedicated header format describing the purpose, and this is recognized by agents. This is a YAML frontmatter wrapped between — .

---
name: my-skill-name
description: A clear description of what this skill does and when to use it.
---
# Skill Title
## Overview
...

---
name: my-skill-name
description: A clear description of what this skill does and when to use it.
---
# Skill Title
## Overview
...

When the agent works on a task matching the description it becomes part of the context, otherwise not.

The first gate

Governance begins with controlling the local coding agents as much as possible, because they touch the system through your workspace. Edit rights of a developer cannot be removed, otherwise how do you expect developer to work right ? Alone or help with the agent, You deliver it, no one else can be blamed or appreciated! Industry software providers must catch-up giving us quality gates, version controlled simulated environments and fast restore capabilities for AI driven development covered by automated test. Such native toolset does not exist in SAP yet, supporting AI driven mass development. Duck tapes like post running custom detection algorithms and simple version control, this is where we are now.

At the end of the reading, You will be able to install the distilled Clean ABAP StyleGuides and Karpathy Guidelines as skills to rule your agent to consider them. Your company should also provide You corporate skills for your daily work matching your development guideline. Note Clean ABAP StyleGuide is not using the prehistoric prefix naming conventions like lv_, ls_ etc, but you can create your own skill

The human aspect

As developers, we need to take responsibility for reviewing the “mess” produced by coding agents. This is a very important point. AI saves typing and clicking effort for experts, but even as an expert, you still have to review the output when implementing new features from scratch, especially before they are covered by automated tests. Skipping reviews will reduce quality and create more headaches.

As a junior developer, your task is the same, but it is even more important for you. If you do not want to lose your job and be replaced by AI agents – or if you simply want to get hired—you need to improve yourself and learn the theory. Frameworks, APIs, domain knowledge, and studying sample implementations all matter.

In the past, we did not have AI for research or summaries, and there was no code generation. We read API specifications, studied framework documentation to understand what was possible, and examined code samples. This was not design – it was research. We learned a lot during this process because those moments were excellent opportunities for upskilling. While searching for answers, we discovered many other useful things. Later, we could recall these insights when designing solutions for different problems.

Today, agents do the research instead of you, and this learning opportunity is lost with each new agent session. Even modern multi-level agent memory management cannot fully compensate for this, but you can. A good example is the UI5 API documentation and samples, or using F1 help in ABAP, where we often discovered useful statement options applicable in practice, or just clocking around inn the menu looking for options.

If you think you can afford to be lazy during such a major technological shift – comparable to the adoption of electricity in everyday life – I have bad news: you are replaceable. Simply sitting in your seat and prompting AI is not enough. If the research is done by agents, you are not learning from it. Understanding the background and learning how to translate requirements into a system model is essential. This is the first half of writing a good prompt that captures functional needs. And you still think refinement meetings are boring?

If you generate working code but do not take the time to understand it as a junior developer—to compensate for the missing research – you learn nothing. Take the time to understand it so you know what to ask from the agent next time, and ask it better. This is another critical part of writing good prompts, because you are building technical knowledge. As a result, the generated code becomes more professional. By learning this, you increase your value in the job market.

Another aspect is accountability: your name is effectively a stamp on the delivered code. Without understanding it, you cannot properly review whether it meets the requirements.

One remaining part of being a successful software developer is knowing how to use AI effectively. This is the focus of this article.

AI is not human intelligence, even though its results can seem impressive through mathematical modelling. In terms of quantity, it already surpasses humans – we cannot process information or perform input/output operations as quickly. However, the quality is still not at the same level. This is where we can make a real impact.

Agentic Skill Management

Many agents like CoPilot lookup by convention in specific local folders inside your project automatically.
Other agents look for for another folder names and filepaths to find skill files. Of course to keep all that in mind and saving the effort to copy the required skills manually to the right diectory a node module already exists. Guess what: https://www.npmjs.com/package/skill
We’ll use that!

Workspace setup

ADT both in Eclipse and VSCode operates with a semantic filesystem. The skills files recognized by agents cannot be saved there. We need to make in our case Github CoPilot aware of those skill files. But how ? Depending on your choice of IDE, we deal with this little bit differently.

Eclipse

Adding local folder

We need to attach a folder to the workspace context in Eclipse. Local folders can be used for that purpose.

Create a folder on your local filesystem, like ADT_ECLIPSE

Mount this to Eclipse via the menu.
File – Open Projects from File System…

By default files starting with . name are not visible. We need configure eclipse to let them appear.

Untick .*resources

Now we have a local folder incorporated into Eclipse.

Installing Skills

Open a Terminal from the ADT_ECLIPSE context menu

Here are the commands:

npx skills add attilaberencsi/sapskills --skill clean-abap

npx skills add attilaberencsi/sapskills --skill clean-abap

npx skills add attilaberencsi/sapskills --skill karpathy

npx skills add attilaberencsi/sapskills --skill karpathy

You should see something like this finishing all the steps properly.

Adding CoPilot Instructions

Long story short: we must rule GitHub CoPilot to look for our Skills under all circumstances.

This is done via CoPilot instructions. This is a rule considered as fixed part of each conversion context.

Take this content as sample, just adjust the path to point your own directory.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/attilaberencsi/sapskills/refs/heads/main/copilot-instructions.md

Bingo

We are ready. From now on at start of each conversation CoPilot will notify You about the located skills. It does not mean it will use it. The description in the YAML frontmatter of the SKILL.MD is read and when judged as applicable for the given task, the skill will be taken on-demand into the context. This is why the skill description has to be really proper.

VSCode

We need a local folder to store our skills to be accessed by CoPilot.

Create a folder on your local filesystem, like ADT_VSCODE and open it in VSCode

Configure a Multi-Root Workspace

Having the ADT_VSCODE opened already, add the SAP Systems / Packages as folders as described here or at SAP Help. So you have the local folder and ABAP Systems side-by-side.

You have to save this workspace configuration before You close VSCode:
File – Save Workspace as

Next time simply open the workspace file to get everything back in VSCode as You left.

Installing Skills

Open the ADT_VSCODE folder in the terminal.

All skills but not all the time! There is an option to pick the skills of your choice. You can first preview the list of available skills for installation.

npx skills add attilaberencsi/sapskills --list

npx skills add attilaberencsi/sapskills --list

At the time of writing all applicable to work using VSCode in PCE, so You can install all at once

npx skills add attilaberencsi/sapskills

npx skills add attilaberencsi/sapskills

or pick the ones of your choice and development scenario, like

npx skills add attilaberencsi/sapskills --skill abap-vscode-pce

npx skills add attilaberencsi/sapskills --skill abap-vscode-pce

Summary

Quality is in our hands always. One thing is to use MCP Servers to create objects, another is to meet certain quality standards filling them with proper content. Some may forgot that readme.md is still for humans, IT IS! No one will read an everlasting synthetic readme documentation, especially what was never reviewed by the one who generated it. Humans need documentation with human mindset applied, so that we can execute our actions according to the documentation w/o demanding to put the synthetic pieces together. Markdowns for agents must go to another places !

Different LLMs need different guidance, and instead of reviewing the same junk again – noticing the recurring mistakes in generated code – rather create your own preventive skills over the time. Simply use the same folder structure as my repository, or look for more features of the skills node module. It knows the folder structure required by agents, which are not following the above skill directory structure.

https://github.com/attilaberencsi/sapskills.git