Skills

"Is there a skill for chasing overdue invoices?" Your assistant searches what your agents know how to do, answers with the one it found, and offers to build one if nothing fits.

A skill is a short written playbook for doing one kind of thing well: the steps in order, what to check, where the judgement calls sit, and what finished looks like. It lives outside any conversation, so any of your agents can pick it up when the work calls for it.

It also keeps your corrections: tell an agent that a credit note goes against the original invoice, and that correction attaches to the skill for every later use, whichever agent does the work. Open a skill on Admin > Skills (/admin/skills) and the notes it has collected are listed above its text, grouped by who collected them.

Player One ships with more than a hundred, from connecting a messaging channel to writing a report, and you add your own.

Where they come from

• Built in. Shipped with Player One and refreshed whenever the platform updates. That refresh replaces them, so they are never the place to keep your own work.
• Built with you. Written in conversation, out of an hour you spent showing your assistant how you do something: Teaching it covers that.
• Imported. Ask for a skill from the public catalogues and Player One finds candidates, runs a security check over each one (hidden characters, anything that would send your data elsewhere, instructions aimed at the agent rather than at the work), shows you the findings, then installs where you choose: one project, one agent, or every agent.
• A project's own. Owned by one project and applying to every agent working in it. A project's version of a skill beats a shared one of the same name inside that project, and the shared one carries on unchanged everywhere else. A sub-project also finds the skills of the projects above it.

How an agent finds one

An agent carries a few small, always-relevant skills with it, and knows the names of a few more.

Everything else it finds by searching, matched on what a skill does rather than on what it is called, at the moment the work needs it. A large library therefore costs nothing until one of its skills is the right one. What loads is the skill plus its corrections, which win over the original wording.

Where they live

Admin > Skills (/admin/skills) is the catalogue of everything your agents know how to do.

Two switches, System for the built-in skills and Custom for the ones you have added, each carry a count and hide or show that group. The search box in the page's header row narrows the list as you type, and clicking a row opens a read-only preview of what the skill actually says. Each row says where the skill came from: Built-in, Added here for one you added to your installation, or One agent's own for one belonging to a single agent. If a skill needs a piece of software your installation does not have, its row says Missing deps and offers a button that fetches it.

Manage > Project > Resources > Skills (/project/manage/skills) holds that project's own library.

Create skill and Import skill open the assistant with the job already framed, a pencil edits one the same way, and a bin removes it to a recoverable trash. Each one there has a visibility setting: Always loaded puts the whole skill in front of every agent in the project, Hinted puts only its description there until it is needed, and Searchable keeps it out until an agent goes looking. Only you can switch a skill to Always loaded, on this page, because it puts the whole skill in the prompt on every message. A child skill that loads by name through another shows a fixed Routed only badge instead. Projects covers working that way.

In a sub-project, an agent finds and loads the skills of the projects above it as if they were the project's own, and a skill that another skill loads by name works the same way. They are never Always loaded or Hinted in the sub-project, whatever their own project chose, so the prompt stays the same size however deep the tree goes. When two levels have a skill of the same name, the nearer one wins. They are not listed on the sub-project's Skills page: open the project that owns one to read or change it. Nothing passes up or sideways.

To see what one agent carries, open it from Manage > Agents (/agents) and read its Skills tab. Its Select view lists every skill the agent can load in three levels. Force-loaded skills are put in front of it in full on every message, Hinted ones appear as a name and a description, and Discoverable ones are found by searching. Search the list, filter by level, move a skill up or down a level, or press Reset to return to the defaults for the agent's role. A skill owned by a project is marked with that project and managed there. Strengths holds the short description of what the agent is good at, and Import takes a skill file, a folder or a link, which the agent scans for problems in a chat before it installs anything.

If an agent is set up with a skill that exists nowhere, a Not found notice above the list names it and says where it was set: Force-loaded, Hinted, Allowed skills or Loaded at start. The agent works without it. You can remove a force-loaded or hinted name from the notice; the others were written when the agent was made, and are shown so the gap is visible.

A skill is how something is done. A fact, such as a supplier's terms, belongs in Memory instead; It remembers shows the two together.