AI agent skill · by @waybarrios

Hf Cloud Aws Context Discovery

Discover the active AWS profile, region, account, and caller identity before SageMaker or AWS work. Use when local AWS context is needed or unspecified; do not use for cloud-agnostic model planning.

Archived 2026-10-23 · Source updated 2026-10-06 · License: MIT. Check the original repository for the latest version.

SKILL.md instructions

# AWS Context Discovery

Before doing any AWS work, read the user's local AWS config. Don't guess the region, and don't ask the user for things their config already answers.

## What to discover

Run these at the start of the AWS work and remember the results for the rest of the session.

### 1. Active profile

`AWS_PROFILE` env var, else `default`. If the user mentioned a profile in their prompt, that overrides. If the named profile doesn't exist in `~/.aws/config`, surface that clearly.

### 2. Region

Resolution order — stop at the first one that produces a value:
1. Region the user explicitly named in this conversation
2. `AWS_REGION` env var
3. `AWS_DEFAULT_REGION` env var
4. `region` field on the active profile in `~/.aws/config`
5. Ask the user — but only after the first four have failed

Do not fall back to `us-east-1` or any other hardcoded default.

### 3. Credentials, account ID, caller ARN

```bash
aws sts get-caller-identity --profile <profile> --region <region>
```

Three purposes in one call: confirms credentials are valid (stop if not), returns the `Account` ID (needed for ARN construction), returns the `Arn` of the caller.

### 4. Identify SSO / assumed-role principals

The `Arn` field tells you what kind of principal this is. The pattern matters because it determines what IAM operations the caller can do.

| ARN pattern | Type | IAM write capability |
|---|---|---|
| `arn:aws:iam::<acct>:user/<name>` | IAM user | Depends on attached policies |
| `arn:aws:sts::<acct>:assumed-role/AWSReservedSSO_<...>/<email>` | **SSO assumed-role** | Typically **none** — can't create/modify IAM roles |
| `arn:aws:sts::<acct>:assumed-role/<role>/<session>` | Regular assumed-role | Depends on the role |

**If the caller is SSO**, surface this immediately before later skills hit `iam:CreateRole` and fail:

> Heads up: you're authenticated via SSO (`AWSReservedSSO_<PermissionSet>_...`). SSO principals usually can't create IAM roles directly. If we need a SageMaker execution role, I'll look for an existing one first — if none exists, you'll need to ask whoever manages your AWS access to create one.

This is the highest-leverage thing this skill does. Surfacing it now turns a confusing mid-deployment error into a five-second conversation.

## Commands to run

```bash
# Effective profile and region (faster than parsing config files)
aws configure list

# Validate credentials and get identity
aws sts get-caller-identity
aws sts get-caller-identity --profile <profile-name>  # if a profile was named
```

`aws configure list` handles env-var overrides and shows the resolved effective values. Prefer it over parsing `~/.aws/config` yourself. If you need to read raw config (e.g. to list profiles), `~/.aws/config` and `~/.aws/credentials` are plain INI files — read-only.

## What to report back

One or two lines, not a wall of text:

> Working with profile `my-profile` in `eu-west-1`, account `123456789012`. You're authenticated via SSO, so we'll need to use an existing IAM role rather than create one.

Don't ask the user to confirm the region you just read from their config — they configured it; that is the confirmation.

If something is wrong (credentials expired, profile doesn't exist, no region anywhere), stop and surface the specific error before continuing.