Skills

A skill is a procedure written down: how to handle one kind of task. Skills belong to the workspace, and any bot can be given any of them.

How a bot uses a skill

A skill has three levels, loaded only as far as needed:

1. Name and description — always visible to the bot, so it can tell when a skill applies.
2. Content — the full procedure, in Markdown. Loaded when the bot decides the skill is relevant.
3. References — extra documents attached to the skill (a price list, an API guide). Read only when the procedure points to them.

So a bot can have many skills without paying for them on every message.

Writing one

• Name: lowercase letters, numbers and single hyphens, up to 64 characters — for example monthly-close. Names are unique in the workspace.
• Description: what the skill is for and when to use it, up to 1024 characters. This is what the bot reads to decide, so make it specific.
• Content: the steps.

The quickest way is to ask a bot: “turn what we just did into a skill”. It writes the skill and attaches it to itself.

Who may write skills

Each bot has a skill authoring setting:

Setting	The bot can
workspace	Create, edit and delete any skill, and attach skills to other bots (default)
own	Create skills and edit only the ones it wrote; attach only to itself
off	Use its skills, but not create or change any

Note

With own, a skill a person wrote stays read-only to the bot, even while the bot uses it every turn.

Via the API

See Skills in the API reference.