May 2026 Developer Meetup: AI Agent Skill for DHIS2 App Development and Other Tips

Development - Développement
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NB: This month’s meetup is happening at a different time than usual: 2026-05-21T09:30:00Z.
The usual day is a public holiday in Norway, so the meetup is moved a week back and at a slightly different time this month.

Hi everyone!

For the May Developer Community Meetup, happening 2026-05-21T09:30:00Z, we’ll be revisiting the subject of AI development assistance. With the growing availability of effective agents for coding, we’ve seen a rapid growth in apps developed with AI assistance, both by people with and without prior programming experience.

This month, we’ll have @eirikhaugstulen from the DHIS2 core team present an agent skill that he’s made for DHIS2 app development that helps agents develop higher quality apps more easily, and how that skill fits into the bigger picture of using agents effectively for app development. Eirik has been experimenting with and using AI agents for development since the earliest popular models, and now regularly uses them to good effect.

We’ll also have a few people who have used the skill share their experiences with it and what they’ve found effective!

The skill, among other things:

  • Enforces some tech patterns that provide helpful structure for agents
  • Gives the agents instructions to help itself understand the API and UI library
  • Enforces a few effective app layouts and designs to make quality interfaces

If you want to get started and try out using it, some instructions from Eirik will be posted in the thread below!

To register for the meetup, please click this link. Upon registering, you will receive a DM on the CoP with the Zoom link for the event, and you’ll receive an email with a calendar invitation for the time slot. If you have registered before, you can use the same meeting link.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

@Developer_Meetups

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#CoPMonthly - May 2026: A Productive Month for DHIS2 Experts! :robot:
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From @eirikhaugstulen:

Good morning everyone!
As some of you may know, I’ve spent a lot of time using ai tools and coding agents these last years.

One thing very apparent to me is that all of these tools and agents share some similarities;

  1. they’ve become freakishly good when used correctly
  2. all models have their own personalities and problems
  3. they’re all really bad at developing DHIS2 apps.

In the context of DHIS2, agents use outdated information, hallucinates core concepts or just doesn’t implement the same technical standards we expect from critical infrastructure. Today, I wanted to share to the community my internal efforts of bridging this gap, by releasing a set of highly opinionated agent skills that follows my personal way of development.

Skills are composable modules you install into any coding agent. When used correctly, they greatly improve the quality of the agent output. I’ve tried to capture some of the tribal knowledge of the technical team, as well as some things that have shown to improve my own experience when developing DHIS2 apps - especially greenfield projects.

It won’t solve everything, but I’m hoping that it can bring value to some of you. You can install it now by running the following command in your terminal:
npx skills add devotta-labs/dhis2-app-skills

(NB: Check to make sure the script installs the skill in the right directory. Sometimes it installs the skill in just in an .agents/ directory, even if you instruct it to install skill in another directory like .claude/)

So where does it perform better?
The current skills are designed to improve performance in four areas

  • General technical abilities (caching of data vs metadata, pagination, UX, separation of concerns, API contracts, etc.)
  • UI Primitives (tables, cards, widgets, loading / error states)
  • Forms
  • Dashboard

To reach this performance, the skills are highly opinionated and draw heavy inspiration from the apps that I’ve worked on.

How do I get started?
Using the skill should be as simple as running the command to install and then invoking it by typing /dhis2-app-development.

To get the best output, make sure to aggressively clear the message history or start a new chat. Invoke the skill after each time you clear the chat.

And as a last point…
These skills are far from done and still have tons of papercuts. Like all other things in the AI world, it’s still highly experimental. All of the code is of course open source and free to use. Any feedback or improvements are greatly appreciated and feel free to steal, fork, or otherwise make this work for your system.

Cheers :wave:

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