TAO Setup

One-time session bootstrap for the TAO skill bank. TAO skills are standalone — each model, data, and platform skill carries its own pinned container image and instructions — but multi-skill workflows chain them (data prep, train, evaluate, deploy). This skill provides the session-level pieces that make that chaining work when skills are installed individually: the discovery flow, the credential conventions, and the host preflight.

When the full skill bank is installed as a plugin from this repository, a SessionStart hook injects this guidance automatically and you do not need to run this skill. When skills were installed one-by-one from a skills catalog, run this skill first.

Quick Start

Individual skill installs do not include the shared scripts/ helpers. Obtain a complete TAO skill bank checkout at the same release ref as the installed skills, then verify it before using any shared helper. If the checkout is elsewhere, set TAO_SKILL_BANK_PATH to its root. Reuse a plugin-provided path when present. If no checkout exists, obtain it with user approval, for example git clone --branch <installed-release-ref> --single-branch https://github.com/NVIDIA-TAO/tao-skill-bank.git <bank-dir>. Point TAO_SKILL_BANK_PATH at that checkout and stop if the helper check fails.

export TAO_SKILL_BANK_PATH="${TAO_SKILL_BANK_PATH:-$HOME/tao-skill-bank}"
for item in versions.yaml scripts/resolve_tao_model.py scripts/resolve_tao_image.py scripts/check_tao_launch_preflight.py scripts/redact_secrets.py scripts/tao_job_record.py skills/models skills/platform; do
  [ -e "$TAO_SKILL_BANK_PATH/$item" ] || { echo "Incomplete TAO skill bank: missing $item under $TAO_SKILL_BANK_PATH" >&2; exit 1; }
done

set -a; source /path/to/.env; set +a   # omit if already exported

# 1. Host preflight — most TAO skills dispatch docker containers on a GPU host.
docker info > /dev/null && echo "OK: docker" || echo "MISSING: docker"
nvidia-smi > /dev/null && echo "OK: GPU" || echo "MISSING: NVIDIA GPU/driver"

# 2. Credential presence check — names only, never print values.
for v in NGC_KEY HF_TOKEN WANDB_API_KEY ACCESS_KEY SECRET_KEY S3_BUCKET_NAME S3_ENDPOINT_URL BREV_API_TOKEN; do
  [ -n "${!v:-}" ] && echo "SET:   $v" || echo "unset: $v"
done

# 3. NGC registry login (needed for nvcr.io image pulls). Key goes over
#    stdin — never as an argv flag, where it lands in the process table.
[ -n "${NGC_KEY:-}" ] && printf '%s' "$NGC_KEY" | docker login nvcr.io -u '$oauthtoken' --password-stdin

# 4. Token-efficient execution kit (recommended): preflight + scaffold
#    ~/.tao-kit/kit.env. Non-invasive; see skills/core/tao-token-efficient-execution.
bash "${TAO_SKILL_BANK_PATH}/skills/core/tao-token-efficient-execution/scripts/install.sh"

If Docker or the NVIDIA host runtime is missing, use the tao-setup-nvidia-gpu-host skill — it checks and (with approval) installs NVIDIA driver 580 or newer, CUDA Toolkit 13.0 or newer, and NVIDIA Container Toolkit 1.19.0 or newer, and can install Docker itself on Debian/RHEL/SUSE-family hosts. These are TAO-wide minimums. If the selected model's references/skill_info.yaml declares runtime_requirements.gpu_host, pass those model-specific minimums to the host setup skill instead.

Credentials

Load a user-approved env file with set -a; source /path/to/.env; set +a in the same bash call as the command that consumes the variable. This skill never creates a credentials file for you; the one credential write here is step 3's docker login, which stores an nvcr.io token in ~/.docker/config.json.

• NGC_KEY — nvcr.io image pulls (most skills)
• HF_TOKEN — gated HuggingFace weights (several model skills)
• WANDB_API_KEY — experiment tracking (optional)
• ACCESS_KEY / SECRET_KEY / S3_BUCKET_NAME / S3_ENDPOINT_URL — S3 I/O
• BREV_API_TOKEN — Brev platform dispatch

Token-efficient execution (recommended for repeated workflows)

Step 4 of the Quick Start installs the execution kit (skills/core/tao-token-efficient-execution): compiled card packs run application workflows as fresh per-stage sessions instead of one long conversation (measured 74-91% cheaper, 4-5x lower peak context, and the only mode validated on small execution models). Setup only scaffolds the config; the routing rule applies at launch time: when a card pack exists for the requested workflow (skills/applications/<skill>/cards/), prefer its driver.sh over in-conversation stage execution. The tao-launch-workflow gate still applies in full — the driver launch is the side-effecting action it reviews. Packs ship today for tao-run-deft-aoi and tao-run-automl; the kit's authoring prompt compiles packs for other workflows.

Discovery flow (how TAO skills chain)

1. Read the task skill. Model skills (tao-train-*, tao-finetune-*) own network specifics; data skills (tao-generate-*, tao-analyze-*, tao-mine-*, …) own transforms; application skills (tao-run-automl, tao-run-deft-aoi, …) compose model + data + platform into workflows.

2. Read the skill's references/skill_info.yaml (when present) for the structured contract: container_image (a pinned URI), or backend_contracts.<backend>.container_image for a multi-backend frontend; per-action command, mode, config_format, inputs, outputs, and optional runtime_requirements.gpu_host. Model runtime requirements override the TAO-wide platform defaults for that workflow.

3. Pick an execution platform and read its skill for mounts, env vars, and resource conventions: tao-run-on-docker conventions apply to any local docker run; tao-run-on-slurm, tao-run-on-kubernetes, and tao-run-on-brev cover managed dispatch; tao-run-on-virtualenv runs a Python script docker-free in a local venv. Externally installed platform skills (e.g. kratos) join as peers — no registration needed. The platforms are equal-class peers — if the user has not chosen, ask; never default silently. Every platform skill implements the same four-verb consumer contract (submit/status/logs/cancel) over its native CLI (docker/kubectl/ssh+sbatch/brev exec) — there is no nvidia-tao-sdk.

4. Construct the spec as nested dicts ({"train": {"num_epochs": 12}}, never flat dotted keys), confirm with the user, then execute the four verbs: tao-launch-workflow drives the shared launch gate; scripts/tao_job_record.py open mints the job id and binds results_dir before launch (record-then-launch); the platform skill runs submit; then monitor with status/logs, mapping native states to the fixed vocabulary PENDING RUNNING COMPLETE ERROR CANCELED UNKNOWN.

Conventions all TAO skills follow

• Confirm before side effects. docker run, job submission, pushes, and file mutations outside the working directory need user confirmation first. Installing a missing Python package prerequisite is the one exception: install it by default and report what was installed.
• Never ask for credentials in chat and never print credential values or the contents of a credentials file; name the missing variable so the user can export it or add it to an env file you then source.
• Container images are pinned per skill. Each skill carries the exact image URI it was validated against; do not swap tags silently. Offer overrides only when the skill documents an override path.
• Runtime requirements are layered. Platform skills own the default host requirements and the check/install mechanism. A model may override only the minimum versions it has validated by declaring runtime_requirements.gpu_host in references/skill_info.yaml; pass those values to the shared host setup check rather than changing the defaults for unrelated models.
• Execution is SDK-free. Job tracking (scripts/tao_job_record.py), S3/data staging (tao-data-io, storage tiers A/B/C), and multi-node (the SLURM/K8s templates + scripts/nccl_allreduce_probe.py) are built into the bank — no nvidia-tao-sdk. The one exception is AutoML search (tao-run-automl), which uses the nvidia-tao-automl wheel and its transitive SDK.

Optional: Codex agent identity

For Codex sessions, scripts/install-codex-agents.sh registers the TAO skill marketplace, installs the plugin, and copies the TAO agent identity to ~/.codex/AGENTS.md so it loads in every session:

bash scripts/install-codex-agents.sh