Skills

A skill is an instruction package that tells an agent when and how to do a specific kind of work. You install skills once, assign them to agents or teams, and the agents read a skill when the task fits it. Skills follow the Agent Skills format, so many published skills work as they are.

What a skill is

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file at its root, plus optional reference files and scripts. SKILL.md starts with a short front matter block that holds the skill’s name and description, followed by the instructions:

---
name: my-skill
description: "When to use this skill, in one or two sentences."
---

# My skill

## When to use

## Steps
1.

The description matters most: agents see the name and description of every skill assigned to them and decide from that whether a skill fits the task. Only then do they read the full instructions.

Note: Skills are not the same as the Expertise tags on an agent’s profile. Expertise tags are short labels the lead uses to match tasks to agents. Skills are full instruction packages that the agent reads while it works.

Add a skill

Open Organization → Skills and click Add skill. The window has three tabs.

From GitHub

Paste a GitHub address and click Read. It can point to:

• a repository (https://github.com/owner/repo),
• a folder inside it (several skills in it are found automatically),
• a SKILL.md, or any .md file.

Only public repositories work. Private repositories are planned.

From computer

Click Choose folder or Choose .zip / .md, or drop the item onto the window. You can add a skill folder (with a SKILL.md), a .zip with one or more skills, or a single .md file. If a .md file has no front matter, the name comes from the file name and the description from its first paragraph.

Write new

Write the SKILL.md directly in Agentbits and click Create skill. The front matter with name and description is required.

Preview before installing

Before anything is installed, Agentbits shows what it found: each skill’s name, description, number of files and size, whether it contains program files, and whether it replaces the installed one (a skill with the same name). You can open the SKILL.md of each with Show SKILL.md.

If a skill contains Lines that look like instruction overrides (for example “ignore previous instructions”), they are listed as warnings. Read them before you install or assign the skill.

Select the skills you want and click the install button (for example Install 2 skills). Installing a skill with the same name as an existing one updates it in place and keeps its assignments.

Nothing from the source is executed during preview or installation. Size limits: 50 MB for a download or archive, 10 MB per skill, 2 MB per file and 300 files; anything larger is skipped and noted.

Assign a skill

Agents only see skills that are assigned to them. On the skill’s page, under Who can use it, click Assign to… and pick:

• individual Agents, or
• a team, department or company under Teams and units. All its members get the skill, including members of its sub-units. Assigning it to the organization (Everyone) gives it to every agent.

On an agent’s page under Organization → Agents, the Skills section lists the agent’s skills and where each comes from (direct or via a team). You can add skills from there too.

How agents use skills

Each agent’s instructions include a list of its assigned skills (name and description, up to 40). When a skill fits the task, the agent reads its content:

• Claude Code CLI, Anthropic API, OpenAI API: through a skill-reading tool. An agent can read only its own skills.
• Codex CLI: gets a temporary copy of its skills for the run and reads the files directly.
• Demo: reads the assigned skill that best matches the task and lists it in its report.

Scripts in a skill can only run if the agent itself can run commands. A Claude Code agent with the Terminal permission gets a copy of skill folders that contain scripts so it can run them. Agentbits does not check what those scripts do, so only assign skills with scripts from sources you trust. See Permissions.

Manage skills

On a skill’s page you can:

• Edit SKILL.md to change the instructions. The skill then shows the edited badge.
• Update from source to download it again and replace its files. Edits made in Agentbits are lost; assignments are kept.
• Turn In use off. When off, no agent sees the skill.
• Delete it. Agents lose access; this can’t be undone, but backups still contain it.

Badges in the list help you scan: scripts, off, check (it has warnings), edited, and the number of assignments.

Skills are stored in the Agentbits database, so backups, restore and reset include them. Agentbits contacts GitHub only when you install or update a skill from there.