Custom Skills

Create, enable, and assign workspace skills that encode your team’s knowledge for agents to apply on every task

Custom skills are workspace-private instruction packages that encode your team’s knowledge — review checklists, runbooks, naming conventions, compliance rules — so agents apply it consistently on every task. You write the context once; agents load it automatically wherever the skill is assigned.

What skills encode

Agents arrive knowing what good looks like in general, not what good looks like in your codebase, your runbooks, or your review standards. A skill externalizes that context so nobody retypes it into every conversation, and senior expertise becomes a team-wide artifact instead of tacit knowledge held by one engineer.

Domain	Examples
Code review	Naming conventions, API design rules, security review checklists, performance hot-spot patterns
Incident response	Escalation policies, runbook selection rules, service-specific debugging order
Cloud operations	Account-tag conventions, environment promotion rules, cost-attribution policies, compliance constraints
Documentation	Style guide, terminology, voice rules

If you find yourself typing the same instruction into more than two prompts, that instruction belongs in a skill.

Prerequisites

• A CloudThinker workspace
• Familiarity with the SKILL.md format if you plan to write skills manually

Create a skill

1. Open Skills

   Navigate to Skills from the sidebar. This page lists every skill in the workspace with its enable toggle and feature assignments.

   
2. Click New Skill

   Choose a creation method from the dropdown.

   
3. Write or generate the skill

   Create with AI

   Describe what you need in plain language and let the skill creation agent draft it.

   1. Click Create with AI to open a chat session.
   2. Describe one concrete rule your team applies — a naming convention, a review checklist item, a deprecation warning.
   3. The agent generates a SKILL.md with frontmatter and structured instructions.
   4. Review the draft and click Save.

   This is the fastest path for a first skill. You can refine it later with AI editing.

   Write skill instructions

   Author the skill manually using the form.

   1. Click Write skill instructions.
   2. Fill in the fields: Name (a slug-format identifier such as api-review-standards), Description (a short summary), and Instructions (the full skill content in Markdown).
   3. Click Save.

   

   See Skill format for the SKILL.md structure and a complete example.

   Success state: the new skill appears as a card on the Skills page.

Enable and assign a skill

A skill does nothing until you turn it on and scope it to at least one feature.

1. Toggle the skill on

   Use the switch on the skill card. Disabled skills are saved but never loaded — useful for drafting changes without affecting live agent behavior.

2. Assign to features

   Check the features where the skill applies. A skill can belong to several features at once:

   • Code Review — applied during PR analysis
   • Incident — applied during incident investigation and root cause analysis
   • Assessment — applied during infrastructure assessments

   Assign the skill only where it belongs; a code-review naming convention does not need to load during incident triage.

3. Verify it works

   Trigger a task in an assigned feature — open a pull request if the skill covers Code Review. Agents consult assigned skills during the Analyze phase of the agentic loop, so your rule should appear in the agent’s reasoning and comments.

   Success state: the agent’s output cites or applies your rule without you restating it. If it doesn’t, the instruction was probably too abstract — rewrite it with concrete examples and retest.

Manage skills

View details

Click a skill card to open the detail view: file tree on the left, rendered markdown on the right. Read the instructions end to end — a rule that is ambiguous to you will be ambiguous to the agent.

Edit with AI

From the detail view, click Edit with AI to refine the skill through conversation — add examples, remove ambiguity, restructure sections. The agent reads the existing content before making changes.

Delete

Remove a skill permanently from the detail view.

Deleting a skill cannot be undone. Disable it instead if you may need it again.

Writing effective skills

• Be specific. Concrete rules with examples beat vague guidelines — “use kebab-case for multi-word paths” outperforms “follow our naming style”.
• One domain per skill. Separate security rules from performance guidelines so you can assign them independently.
• Lead with examples. Agents follow demonstrated patterns more reliably than abstract explanations.
• Test on one feature first. Enable a new skill on a single feature, review a few real runs, then assign it more broadly.
• Iterate. Use Edit with AI to sharpen skills based on review results and team feedback.

Next steps

Skill Format

Learn the SKILL.md file structure, frontmatter reference, and best practices for writing effective instructions.

Skills Overview

Understand how skills fit into the CloudThinker platform and agent workflow.