Skills

Skills are workflows and expertise your agents apply on their own — a code review checklist, a report format, the way your team qualifies deals. Instructions in a skill are injected into the agent’s context when the skill is active, so the know-how travels with the work.

Without skills, that expertise lives in fragile places: someone’s head, or the instructions of one particular assignment. Every new prompt restates the house rules, and every restatement drifts a little. A skill writes the know-how down once and applies it wherever the agent works — a chat session, a scheduled report, a webhook-triggered run. When the process changes, you edit the skill and every agent that carries it changes with it.

Skills are procedure; the knowledge base is reference. If it’s “how we do this,” write a skill. If it’s “what is true” — product specs, policies, past decisions — it belongs in knowledge, where agents consult it while working.

Creating a skill

From Customize → Skills, choose New and either write the skill or upload one (.tgz/.zip). A skill has three parts:

• A Name — what the skill is called wherever it appears.
• A Description — “a short description that helps agents decide when to apply this skill.” This line does real work: the agent reads it when choosing whether the skill is relevant to the task at hand.
• Instructions in markdown — the know-how itself. The AI Assist button can generate or enhance the instructions from a description of what you want.

A concrete example — a skill a sales workspace might keep:

Name: Deal qualification

Description: Apply when researching, scoring, or writing up a sales prospect or opportunity.

Instructions: Qualify every prospect against four criteria, in order: budget signal, access to the decision maker, timeline, and fit with our ideal customer profile (see icp.md). Score each from 1 to 3 and total them. A total under 8 is a nurture, not a pursue — say which one explicitly. Write the summary using templates/qualification.md, and end with a single recommended next action.

Beyond the main instructions, a skill can carry supporting files and folders — templates, examples, reference data — all editable in place, all with revision history and restore. The example above leans on two of them: the icp.md the criteria refer to, and the template the write-up follows. Keeping those files inside the skill means the procedure and its materials version together; restoring an old revision restores both.

Write the description as a trigger

Agents use the description to decide when the skill applies, so phrase it as a condition: “Apply when triaging inbound support tickets” gives an agent something to match against; “Support stuff” does not. If a skill fires too often or not often enough, the description is usually the thing to fix.

Scopes

Skills live at three scopes, shown as badges wherever skills appear:

• Agent — owned by one agent, managed on that agent’s Abilities card.
• Workspace — shared with everyone in the workspace, managed in Customize.
• Org — inherited by every workspace in the organization, managed by org admins in Organization Settings.

Scope tracks how widely the know-how is true. A procedure only one agent needs — the exact format of this agent’s Monday report — is an agent skill. Team conventions — how the support team triages, how the sales team qualifies — are workspace skills. Company-wide standards — the house writing style, the brand voice — are org skills, so every workspace inherits them without anyone re-creating them.

A workspace skill can be promoted with Share org-wide (workspace admins who are also org admins), or created org-wide from the start with Share with entire organization. Promotion is the natural path for a skill that proves out as one team’s convention before the whole organization gets it.

Skills on an agent

The agent’s Abilities card lists its skills. Add workspace skills with Use Skill, activate or remove them per agent, and create agent-private skills right on the card. Skills that come with the territory — inherited or always-on — are marked Always on.

Two related controls live elsewhere. An assignment’s Options can pin skills the agent should always use for that job — by default the agent decides — see Assignments. And whether an agent may write skills of its own is part of the self-improvement guardrail: an agent allowed to do so can capture what it learns as a skill, which you can then review like any other.

Patterns that work

• Format skill — the shape of a deliverable: what sections a weekly report has, how a customer brief is structured, what a good release note looks like. Carry the template as a supporting file.
• Process skill — steps in a fixed order: deal qualification, incident triage, candidate screening. The instructions say what to check, in what order, and what the decision rule is.
• Checklist skill — a rubric applied to work before it ships: a code review checklist, a QA pass, a pre-publish review. Useful as an org skill when the bar should be the same everywhere.
• Voice skill — how the company writes: tone, terminology, things never to say. One org-wide skill beats a style note pasted into every prompt.