Skills
Adding skills from the catalog or from scratch, customizing, enabling/disabling, promoting to your company, and file rules.
What a skill is
A skill is a reusable capability you add to a Teammate — like a software package, but for agents. You add a skill to a specific Teammate; the same skill from the catalog can be added to multiple Teammates on your agent servers without having to rebuild it each time.
Adding a skill
You can add a skill to a Teammate two ways:
| Source | What you get |
|---|---|
| Catalog | A skill template we maintain — managed, auto-updating on future deploys |
| From scratch | A starter SKILL.md, fully yours from the start — custom, no template attached |
Managed vs. custom
A catalog skill is managed — it keeps receiving updates automatically. Editing its files converts it to custom, permanently.
Warning: Customizing a managed skill is a one-way fork, exactly like customizing a Teammate's workspace. Once you edit a managed skill's files, it stops receiving updates and there's no path back — only custom skills can have their files edited, uploaded, or deleted, so a managed skill has to be switched to custom mode first before you can touch its content.
Enable / disable
A skill attached to a Teammate can be enabled or disabled independently of whether it's installed. Only enabled skills are included the next time that Teammate deploys — disabling a skill you're not currently using keeps it available without it taking up room in what actually ships.
Promoting to your company
A skill you've created yourself (not a catalog skill) can be promoted from personal to company-shared, making it available to every Teammate in your org rather than just the one it started on.
Warning: Promoting a skill to company-level is one-way, and only the skill's original owner can do it. There's no way to un-promote a skill back to personal-only once it's shared with the company.
Only custom, user-owned skills are eligible for promotion — managed catalog skills can't be promoted (they're already available to everyone through the catalog).
File rules
| Rule | Detail |
|---|---|
SKILL.md size |
Up to 200 KB, text-only |
| Other files | Up to 200 MB each |
| Path depth | No more than 10 directories deep |
| Path format | No .. segments, no leading / |
| Skill name | Lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens, up to 64 characters; unique per Teammate |
SKILL.md deletion |
Never allowed — every skill must keep one |
SKILL.md is the skill's agent-facing instruction document, so it's kept small and reviewable; everything else in a skill (reference docs, scripts, fixtures, binaries) can be much larger.
What deploys
Skill file edits are workspace-file-style changes — they reload quickly on your next deploy rather than triggering a full agent-server rebuild. See Deploys & pending changes for the distinction between that kind of quick reload and the slower rebuild that model, secret, or channel changes trigger.
API and MCP
Skills have full dashboard/API/MCP parity: listing the catalog, adding, customizing, editing files, enabling/disabling, promoting, and removing are all available through the API and MCP tools as well as the dashboard. See API & MCP for the resource map.