Skills
A skill is a procedure that worked, recorded once so the next session does not work it out again.
Browse the store
Section titled “Browse the store”Settings, AI, Skills shows the shared skill store: Discover trusted procedures from the shared skill store. Use Search skills, switch between all, installed and pending, filter by provider, and choose Use skill on a card.
Sources are jensen, skills_sh and github. Each card shows its name, description, provider and
whether it is installed, cached or available.
Open a card for Skill details: License, Trust and audit, Content hash, any findings and the list of files in the package. You see what you are about to trust. When the catalog is unreachable, Jensen says Showing cached results while the catalog is offline.
Where skills come from
Section titled “Where skills come from”An assistant that works out something worth keeping stages it as a skill with skill_stage. Staged
skills sit in Artifacts, under Staged skills, in the session pane.
What happens next depends on who wrote it.
- A normal session. Its staged skills become project skills when the session retires.
- A specialist. Its skills stay inside its scope. After two successful sessions a skill becomes ready for your approval, and it never activates on its own. See Specialists.
You can record one yourself:
record also takes --version, --tag, --body-file and --ref <name>=<path>.
Why a skill is not an install
Section titled “Why a skill is not an install”A skill will be replayed, so a mistake in one becomes a habit. A skill’s script runs only with explicit permission, and only along a path confined to that skill’s own package. Approving a skill as documentation never lets it run arbitrary code.
How an assistant finds them
Section titled “How an assistant finds them”Before the first edit, Jensen nudges the assistant to check skill_list. A search hit that is a skill
tells it how to open it, and skill_use delivers the whole package. Use is recorded, so a skill nobody
uses shows up as unused. See the Assistant tool reference.
Skills, memory and context
Section titled “Skills, memory and context”Three different things, kept apart on purpose.
| Holds | Answers | |
|---|---|---|
| Project context | Decisions | How work is done here |
| Memory | Facts | What is true about this project |
| Skills | Procedures | How to do this specific thing |
One query searches all three, so an assistant need not know which holds the answer.