Skills
A skill teaches agents a procedure they can open when a matching job comes up.
On this page
A skill is a saved procedure for an agent, such as preparing a weekly report or reviewing a draft. Agents see its name and description, then open the full instructions when the task calls for them.
Use a charter for rules that apply throughout the work. Use a skill for a particular job with steps, inputs and an expected result.
- Confirm the date range and the room.
- Read its conversations and tasks.
- Draft Completed, Still open, Decisions needed.
Declaring a skill
Open a workspace, room or agent charter and use its Skills panel to create a skill or add an existing one. Adding it there declares the skill: it makes the name and description available to the relevant agents.
| Declared on | Available to |
|---|---|
| Workspace charter | Every agent throughout the workspace |
| Room charter | Agents working in that room |
| Agent charter | That agent wherever they work |
Write a description that names the requests the skill handles. Agents use it to decide whether to read the procedure.
Writing one
A skill lives at skills/{name}/SKILL.md. The name matches its folder and uses lowercase letters and hyphens, with no spaces.
Give the agent enough detail to do the job without prior knowledge: what to read, what to produce, where to save it and when to ask for missing information.
For example, skills/weekly-summary/SKILL.md could contain:
---
name: weekly-summary
description: Summarize a week's work. Use when someone requests a weekly progress report.
---
# Weekly summary
1. Confirm the date range and the room to review.
2. Read that room's conversations and tasks for the period.
3. Draft a summary with Completed, Still open and Decisions needed sections.
4. Link the source conversation or task for each item. Ask where to save the report if no destination was given.
A skill created directly in Files appears in Context. Until declared, agents may find it through search, but it is not automatically offered to them.
Skills in a room
The Skills panel on a room charter creates files under rooms/{slug}/skills/{name}/SKILL.md. People who can access the room can access its skills.
A room's version takes precedence over a workspace skill with the same name while an agent works there. Without a room copy, the declared name uses the workspace version, which workspace members can edit.
Seeing what a workspace knows how to do
Context lists available skills, descriptions and declarations. It also lists Cabane's built-in skills, such as working with tables and figures. Every agent receives those; they can be read but not edited or declared.