Skills

Skills are on-demand instruction sets that agents can load when they need specialized knowledge. Instead of stuffing every possible instruction into an agent’s system prompt, skills are discovered and loaded contextually.

How Skills Work

1. On session start, the agent receives a skill manifest — a compact list of available skills with descriptions
2. When the agent encounters a task that matches a skill, it calls load_skill("name")
3. The full skill instructions are loaded into context
4. The agent follows the skill’s procedures

This keeps system prompts lean while giving agents access to deep, specialized knowledge when needed.

Skill File Format

Skills are markdown files with YAML frontmatter:

---
name: github-pr
description: Opening and merging GitHub pull requests
tags: [github, git, pr, pull-request, merge]
enabled: true
---

# GitHub PR Skill

## When to Use
When you need to open a pull request, review PR changes, or merge branches.

## Steps
1. Ensure all changes are committed and pushed
2. Create PR with descriptive title and body
3. Link to relevant issue or task
...

Skill Locations

Skills can be stored at two levels:

Agent-specific skills override global skills with the same name.

Automatic Matching

The engine automatically matches skills to pipeline steps by comparing skill tags against the step input text. If a step mentions “github” or “pull request,” skills tagged with those keywords are auto-injected.

This means agents often get the right skills without explicitly calling load_skill().

Managing Skills

Dashboard

The Skills page in the dashboard lets you:

• View all global and agent-specific skills
• Enable/disable skills without deleting them
• Edit skill content
• Create new skills

Skill Generator

The dashboard includes a skill generator — an AI-assisted chat session that helps you create new skills through conversation. Describe what the skill should cover and it writes the instructions.

API

# List skills
GET /v1/skills

# Get a specific skill
GET /v1/skills/{name}?agent_id=yukihiro

# Create a skill
POST /v1/skills
{
  "name": "my-skill",
  "description": "Does something useful",
  "tags": ["relevant", "tags"],
  "content": "# My Skill\n\n...",
  "scope": "global"
}

# Toggle enabled state
PATCH /v1/skills/{name}/enabled
{ "enabled": false }

Creating Effective Skills

Good skills are:

• Specific — focused on one domain or task type
• Procedural — step-by-step instructions, not vague guidance
• Tagged well — keywords that match when agents encounter relevant tasks
• Example-rich — show concrete examples of commands, code, and output