Agents
Skills
Skills are reusable instructions maintained by your organization and shared across agents. Creating a skill, publishing its instructions, and granting an agent access are separate steps.
Create and publish a skill
Open Skills and create a skill with a name and description, then write its instructions. The description tells agents when the skill applies. Names use lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens, and are permanent: to use a different name, create a new skill.
Save your changes, then publish the skill revision you want agents to use. Saving alone does not update the published instructions. Republishing a skill updates it for every agent that already grants it, without republishing those agents. The published revision is resolved at the start of a turn, so publishing does not replace instructions midway through that turn.
Grant skills to an agent
Open the agent's Skills settings and select the individual skills it may load. A draft skill can be granted, but the agent cannot load it until it has a published revision.
Skill activation controls approval for loading the granted skills:
- Allow: the agent can load a skill without requesting approval.
- Ask: loading a skill pauses for the user's approval.
Save and publish the agent to make grant and approval changes available to users. Publishing a skill does not grant it to an agent automatically.
How skills load
The agent receives the names and descriptions of available skills. Their full instructions load on demand when the agent requests a skill; they are not included in every turn like the agent's prompt.
A skill's instructions do not grant tools, actions, or other skills. Those capabilities must also be configured on the agent. See Mentions for referencing them in instructions.
If a granted skill is deleted or has no published revision, it is skipped and the agent continues without it. Remove stale grants from the agent's settings when a skill is no longer available.