About skills

A skill is a named, reusable capability an agent can call — a summariser, a "post to Slack" action, a scripted workflow. Skills give an agent more than raw tools: they package a description, an input and output shape, and the work itself into one thing the model can discover and invoke by name.

The skill catalog

Every skill an agent can see comes from the skill catalog. The catalog spans several scopes that layer on top of each other:

• System skills ship with the platform and are visible to every account out of the box (search, fetch a URL, summarise, escalate to a human, and more).
• Account skills are shared across your organization.
• Project skills carry per-project context.
• User and agent skills are narrower still — personal drafts, or skills bound tightly to one agent.

When two skills share the same name, the more specific scope wins: an account skill named web-search shadows the system one for your account's agents, and the shadowed entry stays visible in the catalog marked as such. This is how you override a built-in without forking it.

First-party vs. your own

• First-party (system) skills are curated and maintained by connect0. You can use them as-is or shadow them with your own version.
• Customer-authored skills are the ones you write, or import from a GitHub repo or npm package. Imported skills are pinned to a specific revision, so an upstream change surfaces as a reviewable update rather than silently altering behaviour.

Both kinds share one format — a short frontmatter card (name, description, when to use it, input/output schema) plus a body. The card is what the model sees when deciding whether to reach for the skill; the body loads only when the skill actually runs.

How a skill attaches to an agent

A skill becomes usable to an agent when it is in scope and granted. System skills are available to every agent; account, project, and agent skills are attached from the agent's Skills tab. Because agents default closed, a skill in the catalog is not callable until you attach it — and every invocation is audited and metered like any other work.

Where to go next

• Authoring a skill to write your own.
• Managing skills to enable, scope, and attach skills to agents.