Skills

A skill is a reusable piece of capability with no assistant of its own: a set of instructions, knowledge bases, and tools that gets folded into an agent that references it, rather than something you open and talk to directly.

Skills don't have their own screen. They're made, listed, and managed from the Agents screen, alongside your standalone agents, and told apart by the Kind column.

Skill vs. agent

Both are built from the same pieces: instructions, knowledge bases, and tools. What tells them apart is what happens when they're used:

• An agent (Kind: Agent) answers on its own. It has a model behind it, you can open a chat with it, and other agents can hand work to it.
• A skill (Kind: Skill) has no model of its own. Nobody chats with it directly, and it doesn't appear in the agent picker at the top of a chat. Instead, when an agent that references it reaches a point where it's relevant, that skill's instructions and knowledge are folded into what the agent is working with for that turn.

Think of an agent as a colleague you talk to, and a skill as a reference card that colleague keeps in a drawer and pulls out when it applies.

Where to find them

Open Agents from the main navigation. The list is one roster, agents and skills together, with a Kind badge on each row so you can tell which is which at a glance. Search and paging work the same way across both.

Creating a skill

If you have permission, click New Agent from the Agents screen, then set its Type to Skill in the form. You'll fill in the same fields a standalone agent has:

• Name and description, so people composing an agent know what this skill is for.
• Instructions, what gets added when the skill applies.
• Knowledge bases and tools it can bring with it.

There's no model to pick for a skill, since it never runs one of its own.

When to make a skill instead of an agent

Reach for a skill when what you're building is a capability meant to be shared across, or bolted onto, other agents, rather than something people should talk to on its own. If you find yourself wanting the same instructions, the same knowledge base, or the same tool available from more than one agent without copying and pasting a prompt between them, that's a skill. If what you're building is a destination someone opens a conversation with, that's a standalone agent.

Where to next

• Agents for the full picture of what an agent is built from.
• Chats for how to talk to an agent.
• Tools for the systems a skill can bring with it.