Skills

A skill is a reusable instruction package: a Markdown document that teaches an agent how to perform a specific kind of work. "How we write release notes." "The vendor evaluation checklist." "Our escalation protocol."

Skills are not tools. A skill tells the agent how to work; a tool gives it something it can do.

When to write a skill

Reach for a skill when:

• The same procedure should apply across several agents. Write once, bind everywhere, update in one place.
• The system prompt is growing past its job. Prompts should state purpose and boundaries; step-by-step procedures belong in skills.
• The behavior is situational. Skills load when relevant instead of weighing down every conversation, so an agent can carry many without bloating every prompt.

Writing a good skill

Create skills under Console → Resources → Skills.

A skill that works reads like a procedure a careful colleague would follow:

# Vendor evaluation

Use this when asked to evaluate or compare vendors.

## Steps
1. Collect: company profile, pricing, references, compliance status.
2. Score each dimension 1 to 5 using the rubric below.
3. Flag any compliance gap as a blocker, regardless of score.

## Output
A comparison table, then a recommendation of at most three sentences.
Never recommend a vendor with an open compliance flag.

Concrete beats abstract. Include the output format. State the hard rules ("never recommend...") explicitly, since those are the ones that matter.

Binding and scope

Skills are workspace resources. Bind a skill to each agent that should follow it; unbinding removes the behavior from that agent without deleting the skill. Skill changes ship to a live agent through its normal publish flow.