Standard Skill: Create a Skill

Create a Skill is a Standard Skill: it teaches the agent how to write a good Skill. The agent loads it when you ask it to turn a task or a way of working into a Skill, to improve a Skill, or when you ask what a good Skill looks like.

What a good Skill has

• A precise name. One to 64 lowercase letters, digits and hyphens, such as board-pack-check.
• A description that says what the Skill does and when to use it, in the words you would use. The agent picks a Skill by its description, so this is the part that matters most.
• Short instructions, in the order of the work: the steps, what to check and what the answer looks like.
• Examples of a request and a good result.
• Scripts only where code does better, such as arithmetic or a repeatable transformation.
• Files next to the instructions, such as templates or reference tables, that the agent reads only when it needs them.

Never put credentials or personal data in a Skill.

Saving the Skill

The agent saves the Skill as a Personal Skill of yours, or as a new version of one, only after you approved it: you see the description and the files and accept, edit or reject them first. See Let the agent create a Skill. It never changes a Standard Skill, but offers a Personal Skill based on it. A Tenant Skill is changed only by a request: see Let the agent propose a change to a Tenant Skill.

When a Skill is the wrong choice

The agent tells you when something belongs elsewhere:

• A preference or a fact about you, such as the language or the level of detail you like, belongs in Memory.
• What a business term means, or how a metric is calculated, belongs in the Semantic Layer, so that every answer uses it.
• A one-off request needs no Skill. A Skill pays off for a procedure that recurs, takes several steps, or needed several corrections.

Versions

Each Standard Skill has a version number and a short changelog, which changes whenever the Skill does. The line the agent shows when it uses the Skill names the version it used.