Custom Skills

Create, enable, and attach workspace skills to Chat, Code Review, Incident, and Assessment

Custom skills are workspace-private instruction packages that encode your team’s knowledge — review checklists, runbooks, naming conventions, compliance rules — for agents to use on attached product surfaces. A skill is eligible only when it is enabled and attached; eligibility does not load its body on every task.

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
• The workspace-settings edit permission — without it the New Skill control is hidden
• 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, or open Chat Settings (the gear icon beside the + button in the chat prompt box) and select Skills under Agent Configuration. 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. Create, write, or upload the skill

   Create with CloudThinker

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

   1. Click Create with CloudThinker 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 Name (letters, digits, underscores, and hyphens, such as api_review-standards), optional Description, and Instructions (the full skill content in Markdown).
   3. Click Save.

   

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

   Upload zip file

   Upload a .zip package, up to 5 MB. The package must contain SKILL.md and can include permitted scripts/, schemas/, and references/ directories.

   A package without name frontmatter takes the name of the folder containing SKILL.md. See Skill format for package and metadata rules.

   Browse Skills Hub

   Opens the public skills catalog in a new tab, where you can review skills the community and CloudThinker publish.

   Success state: the new skill appears as an enabled card attached to Chat.

Enable and attach a skill

A skill is eligible only when it is enabled and attached to a supported surface. New workspace skills start enabled and Chat-attached; the other surfaces require an attachment.

1. Toggle the skill on

   Use the switch on the skill card. A disabled skill stays saved but is hidden from every surface, which is useful while you draft changes.

2. Attach to surfaces

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

   • Chat — the default attachment for a new workspace skill
   • Code Review — used during pull request analysis
   • Incident — used during incident investigation and root cause analysis
   • Assessment — used during infrastructure assessments

   Attach the skill only where it belongs. Clear all attachments to hide it everywhere.

3. Verify it works

   Trigger work where the rule should change the result. In Chat, Incident, and Assessment, eligible skills appear in the workspace catalog and agents use load_skill to read them. Code Review currently preloads attached bodies under a bounded policy.

   Success state: a result that needs the rule reflects it without you restating the instruction. If it does not, rewrite the skill 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.

When you manually edit SKILL.md, its name frontmatter must match the selected skill name. The edit is rejected if the name is missing or different.

Delete

Remove a skill permanently from the detail view.

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

Troubleshooting

This skill name is already in use

Another skill in the workspace has that name. Pick a different name.

Skill name is reserved

The name matches a skill CloudThinker ships in its public catalog, which would wrongly give yours an Official badge. Pick a different name.

Only .zip files are accepted

The Skills page uploads .zip packages only. Put your SKILL.md in a folder and zip that folder.

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 surface first. Keep a new skill attached only to Chat, review a few real results, then attach 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.