Skills

A skill is a reusable piece of instructions the agent can load on demand. Think of it as a named prompt — a playbook, a recipe, a style guide, or a complex procedure you don't want to re-explain every time.

Skills belong to a project: your Personal project has its own, and so does each agent.

When to use skills

  • You have a repeated workflow ("how to triage incoming support tickets").
  • You have a style guide ("how we write customer emails").
  • You have a multi-step procedure that's too long to paste into every chat.
  • You want to share institutional knowledge across an agent's people without re-typing it.

If instructions apply to everything the project does, put them in the project's Instructions instead (see Organizations & Projects). Skills are for things the agent should pick up only when they're relevant.

How the agent uses them

Skills aren't loaded automatically — the agent reads them when it needs to. It can:

  • Search for a relevant skill by topic or keyword.
  • Read the full body of a skill it finds useful for the current task.

You can nudge the agent to use a specific skill ("use the customer-support skill") or trust it to find one on its own.

What the agent may do with each one

Every skill has an Access setting, shown in the list and on the skill itself. It says what the agent may do; you can always read and change the skill yourself.

  • Off — the agent neither lists nor reads it. Use it to park a skill without deleting it.
  • Read — the default. The agent reads it when it's relevant.
  • Write — the agent may also update it. A skill the agent writes for itself starts at Write.

Creating and editing

Open the project's Settings → Skills. Click a skill to open it in place, or Create to write a new one. Each skill has:

  • Name — anything you like, as long as it's unique in the project (Customer support, Migration playbook).
  • Description — one line so the agent knows when to reach for it.
  • Body — the actual instructions. Markdown is fine.

The agent can create and update skills too — useful for capturing what you've taught it across conversations. Ask it to ("save this as a skill"), and set the skill's access to Write if you want it to keep refining one you wrote.