Skills

A skill is a written procedure for one kind of task, such as drafting a weekly report or summarizing a meeting. The agent sees each skill’s name and its When to use text at all times, and reads the full instructions only when a request matches. That keeps the system prompt short while the agent still knows how to do many specific things well.

Skills are used by agents running in Deep mode. See Deep agents.

Create a skill

1. Open Build → Skills and select New skill.

2. Fill in the fields:

   Field	What it does
   Name	Required. Lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens, up to 64 characters, for example weekly-report. It cannot start or end with a hyphen.
   When to use	Required. Up to 1024 characters. The agent reads this to decide whether the skill applies, so describe the situation, not the steps: “Use this skill when the user asks you to draft a weekly status report or activity summary.”
   Instructions	Required. The procedure itself, in Markdown. The agent follows it verbatim, so be specific about steps, format and what to avoid.

3. Select Start from template to begin from a starter instead of a blank page. The templates are research, weekly-report, email-composer, data-analysis and meeting-summary.

4. Save the skill.

Skill names are unique within a workspace.

Give a skill to an agent

1. Open the agent and set Harness to Deep under Deep Agent Mode.

2. Under Skills, select each skill the agent should have. Selected skills are highlighted.

3. Select Update Agent.

A skill can be shared by any number of agents. Editing it changes it for all of them.

Edit and delete

Use the pencil and trash icons on a skill’s card. Deleting a skill removes it from every agent that uses it.

Tip

Write one skill per task, and make When to use distinct for each one. Two skills with overlapping descriptions leave the agent guessing which to open.

Permissions

Viewing skills needs agents.view. Creating, editing and deleting them need agents.create, agents.edit and agents.delete. See Users and roles.