Skills are playbooks, not a longer prompt
By Team Two · Last updated September 23, 2026 · 2 min read
A persona tells an agent who it is. A tool tells it what it is allowed to touch. Neither one tells it the steps your company actually follows when a pull request opens, a customer escalates, or a security questionnaire lands.
That third piece is a skill. It is a playbook the agent can pull in for the job in front of it, instead of a giant prompt you hope it remembers every time.
What a skill contains
A skill has a name, a short description, and the instructions for one kind of work. It can also carry reference material: a checklist, a template, a script the playbook points at. The agent activates the skill when the task matches, and it can read those resources while it works.
You can write your own. The built-in set is a starting library, grouped by the kind of work, not by a department slogan:
- Engineering: code review, release management, incident response, security audit, requirements, business-logic docs, changelog, feature setup.
- Customer work: escalation, onboarding, knowledge-base upkeep, RFI answers.
- Sales: pipeline review, discovery notes into the CRM, objection handling, renewal risk.
- Marketing and communications: campaign planning, content, analytics, competitive intelligence, SEO, brand, events, email, social, PR.
- The everyday: meeting prep, meeting notes, stakeholder updates, project management, data analysis, design review, design-to-code.
A skill does not grant a tool
Activating the code-review playbook does not quietly give the agent Bitbucket, Git, and the right to push. Those are tools, and you attach them separately. A skill that mentions Jira still fails the Jira step if that agent has no Jira tool.
That split is the point. The playbook can be shared. The permissions stay on the person and the agent. How those permissions work is covered in Who is in control, and the tool list is in The tools your agents can actually call.
Attach a few, not the whole library
An agent with every skill loaded is an agent with no job. Give the support agent escalation, the knowledge base, and the RFI playbook. Give the engineering agent code review and incident response. Add one when the same request shows up a second time and the agent keeps improvising the steps.
Frequently asked questions
Are skills the same as workflow templates?+
No. A skill guides one agent through a task in conversation. A workflow is a graph of steps that can pause for a person. Templates for those graphs are a separate library.
Can we change a built-in skill?+
Write your own skill with your steps and your templates. Built-in skills are the default playbooks, not a locked process.
