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Skills

A skill is a named, reusable capability that an agent can invoke during a heartbeat.

Skills give agents structured, versioned knowledge: how to interact with an external system, how to follow a specific workflow, how to produce output in a required format. Without skills, every agent has to carry all its knowledge in its base instructions. With skills, knowledge is modular — an agent can be assigned a skill from the squad's catalog, and every agent that holds that skill behaves consistently.

What a skill contains​

Each skill has:

  • A key — a unique identifier within the squad.
  • A name and description — what the skill does and when to use it.
  • A source type — where the skill content comes from (locally authored, catalog-installed, or tower-pushed).
  • A trust level — what content the skill package can contain (markdown_only, assets, or scripts_executables).
  • The skill body — the actual instructions, templates, or protocol the agent follows.

Squad skills​

Squad skills are scoped to a single squad. The Operator or Squad Lead authors them locally — either writing the content directly in the SLAW UI or installing from a skills catalog. Once added to the squad, any agent in that squad can be assigned the skill.

Squad skills are the right choice when:

  • The capability is specific to your squad's workflows or codebase.
  • You want to iterate quickly without waiting for a governed catalog.
  • The skill covers proprietary processes that shouldn't leave the instance.

Tower-standard skills​

When a SLAW instance is enrolled with a Botfather tower, the tower can master the skill catalog and push standard skills down to enrolled instances.

Tower-standard skills are:

  • Centrally governed — the tower admin controls which skills exist, what they contain, and when they update.
  • Consistent across instances — every enrolled instance gets the same skill, ensuring uniform agent behaviour across a fleet.
  • Read-only locally — while enrolled, local agents cannot override or modify tower-pushed skills. The tower is the source of truth.

When an instance is enrolled with a tower, local skill authoring is locked for the governed catalog. You can still author squad-specific skills that the tower doesn't cover.

Trust levels​

Trust levels declare what a skill package can contain:

  • markdown_only — instruction text only.
  • assets — instructions plus bundled asset files.
  • scripts_executables — instructions with executable scripts.

Local Operators set the trust level when authoring a squad skill. Tower-pushed skills carry the trust level set by the tower admin. Higher trust levels allow richer skill packages; Operators grant only the trust level a skill actually needs.

Skills and plugins​

Skills are distinct from plugins. A plugin bundles code and resources — it can provision agents, routines, and managed integrations. Skills are pure instructions — they shape what an agent knows and how it behaves, but they don't add server-side code.

The two often work together: a plugin like @slaw/plugin-jira-sync provisions a managed agent and a managed routine, while the operator-facing guidance for using that integration lives as a tower-standard skill that enrolled squads receive automatically.

Next steps​