Skills

When you want an agent to follow a specific procedure — a code review checklist, a deployment runbook, a customer response template — you could put those instructions in the agent's main configuration. But if you want multiple agents to use the same procedure, or want to keep agent configurations lean and focused, that's where skills come in.

A skill is a reusable instruction document that agents can load on demand. Instead of baking every procedure into every agent's configuration, you write a skill once in the company skill library and make it available to any agent that needs it. The agent reads the skill's description when it starts a task, decides whether the skill is relevant, and loads the full instructions only when it needs them.

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What a skill looks like

A skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file. The file has a short frontmatter block (the routing description) and a body (the actual instructions).

skills/ └── code-review/ ├── SKILL.md └── references/ └── examples.md

The frontmatter description is what the agent reads first — it's written as decision logic so the agent knows when to use this skill:

markdown --- name: code-review description: > Use when asked to review a pull request or code diff. Don't use when writing new code from scratch. ---

Code Review