Skills

A skill is a document that teaches an agent how to do something well: read a PDF, research a topic properly, triage an inbox, notice what changed. Attach it to an agent and those instructions become part of how that agent works.

Built in

Twenty-two ship with Rookery and are available in every workspace with no setup.

• Working with files
  • PDF, spreadsheets (csv, xlsx), Word documents, presentations, markdown
  • Reading text out of images
• How to behave
  • Keeping the knowledge base tidy
  • Detecting what changed since last time
  • Writing notifications worth reading
  • Collaborating with other agents
  • Surviving failures and retrying sensibly
  • Handling time and timezones correctly
• Web and research
  • Researching a topic properly, with sources
  • Driving a real browser
• Development
  • git and GitHub
  • Installing command-line tools it needs
• Productivity
  • Email triage
  • Calendar and scheduling
• Integrations — working with APIs
• Meta — creating skills, and vetting them

Your own

Create one the same way you create an agent: Skills → New, or /skill in a chat app, then describe what it should teach.

Rookery holds a short design conversation, writes the skill, tests any scripts it includes, and then — before saving — runs a separate audit looking for anything malicious: attempts to read your credentials or private notes, calls to raw IP addresses, obfuscated code, destructive commands. A skill that fails the audit is not saved.

You can also import one: upload a ZIP or paste a SKILL.md.

What a skill looks like

skills/<name>/
  SKILL.md        required — instructions, with a description at the top
  scripts/        optional — code the skill runs
  references/     optional — documents it consults when needed

The description at the top is doing more work than it looks. It is what tells Rookery when this skill applies, so write it as “what this does, and when you would want it” rather than a title.

Note

Built-in skills are documents only — they never ship scripts. Your own skills may, because they live on disk in your workspace where the script can actually be found.

How agents get them

When you build an agent, Rookery works out which skills the job needs and attaches those — not all of them. You can change the selection at any time from the agent’s page, and the checkbox list is the source of truth.

If a skill needs a command-line tool that is not installed, the agent is told where to find it or how to install it, rather than failing halfway through a run.