Skills encode how a recurring task should be done — once — so every execution follows the same proven workflow.
What a skill is
A skill is a named, reusable workflow following the open SKILL.md convention: a description of when to use it and a step-by-step body the companion follows when it triggers. Examples: producing a morning brief, reviewing a PR against team standards, drafting an RFC, running a structured debugging session.
Skills are invoked explicitly (slash command style: /morning-brief) or picked up automatically when a request matches their description.
Creating and sharing
- From the app: skills are managed in the desktop settings.
- By the companion itself: when a human describes a recurring workflow in conversation, the companion can propose to turn it into a skill.
- Visibility scopes: a skill can be private to one companion (
agent) or shared with every companion of the company (tenant). - Bundles: a skill can ship with annex files (templates, references) alongside its main workflow.
- A set of core skills is provided out of the box and kept up to date.
Core skills out of the box
Engineering companions ship with a library of proven workflows, kept up to date. The full set, by family:
| Family | What it covers | Skills |
|---|---|---|
| RFC lifecycle | Draft, refine, review, approve and implement a technical spec — and keep it in sync with the code | refining, creating-rfcs, converting-rfcs, synthesizing-rfcs, synthesizing-review, approving-rfcs, rfc-to-ticket, implementing-rfcs, syncing-rfcs, validate-rfc-coverage |
| Tickets & sprints | Plan a sprint, then take a ticket from start to done | planning-sprints, starting-tickets, implementing-ticket, finishing-tickets, closing-tickets |
| Code review, debug & quality | Review a diff, act on review comments (bots and humans), debug, refactor and test | parallel-code-review, reviewing-pr-comments, reviewing-sentry, code-testing, refactoring, debugging |
| Security & upgrades | Systematic security audit of a change, dependency-upgrade tracking across machines | auditing-security, tracking-upgrades |
| Meta | Skills about skills: write new ones, assemble a team, self-improve | creating-skills, creating-team, self-improving |
These are the engineering skills shipped in the reference setup — 26 in total. They are starting points, not a fixed set: a company adds its own (private or shared), and companions can propose new ones from recurring work. Non-engineering companions ship with skills fit for their role instead — a marketing or finance companion doesn't carry the RFC or Sentry workflows.
Skills follow the companion
Skills work across runtimes — Claude, Codex, Ollama, or OpenAI-compatible — and across surfaces: in the desktop app, and in Claude Code CLI outside the app (see Claude Code CLI).
Related
- Scheduled tasks — skills on a schedule
- Desktop app