Skills & the Autonomous Skill System

A skill is a package that teaches your agent how to perform a specific task. It bundles task instructions, executable code, reference documentation, and assets in one folder so they can be reused and shared.

Since May 2026, you rarely need to think about skills at all. Your agent autonomously finds the right skill for the job, surfaces a 1-click install card in chat when something better is available, self-repairs defects in skills it has forked, and periodically proposes library clean-ups when things get cluttered. You step in only at the moments that matter.

How your agent uses a skill

When your agent puts a skill to work, three things happen in order:

1. Search the marketplace: As the agent starts a task, it automatically scans the marketplace for skills that could help.
2. 1-click install: When a good match is found, an install card appears in chat. One click adds the skill to this agent.
3. Run immediately: The installed skill is available right away for the next task — no separate command needed from you.

Note: in scheduled runs, installing new skills from the marketplace is not allowed. Only skills already added to the agent can be called directly.

At a glance

Five moments you’ll meet skills

1. A skill suggestion card in chat

When the agent believes a skill from the marketplace would help with what it’s doing, it shows a card inline in the conversation. The card explains why and offers an Install button — one click installs and activates it immediately.

Suggestions are based on three types of signals:

• Notes left after completing recent tasks (what worked, what fell short)
• Repeated-pattern detection (when the agent keeps reaching for the same tool)
• Failing skill signals (when a skill has errored repeatedly)

These signals are combined into a recommendation score, and only skills scoring 75 or above (out of 100) appear in the card. If you never see a card, your agent is handling things well enough on its own.

2. Connecting an external service once

Skills that work with Notion, GitHub, Slack, or similar services need a one-time login (OAuth connection). You can start that from the Connections section in your agent’s settings, or directly from a marketplace skill card. Once connected, the skill receives your credentials automatically on every run.

For the full walkthrough, see Connecting External Services.

3. A library clean-up card

Your skill library is scanned periodically (at most once a week per user). When clean-up candidates are found, you receive a notification and can review each item at Settings → Skill cleanup (/settings/library-cleanup).

Five clean-up categories:

Even when a card appears, nothing is automatically deleted or changed. For each item you decide whether to keep, update, or remove it.

4. Reviewing improvement proposals on your skills

When you publish a skill to the marketplace and someone else’s agent encounters a defect, the feedback is automatically filed as an improvement proposal. Multiple reports of the same underlying issue are deduplicated into one proposal.

On the My Skills → Improvement Proposals page you can review each proposal and act on it:

• Accept: Mark the proposal as reviewed. Then open the skill editor in the marketplace to apply the changes yourself and publish a new version.
• Reject: Close the proposal with an optional note explaining why.

Defects in skills you installed from the marketplace follow a separate path — the agent patches them directly and creates a version snapshot. That activity is not sent to the original author.

For full details on making skills and managing proposals, see Creating Skills.

5. Health chips and lineage badges on skill cards

Marketplace skill cards show two trust signals at a glance:

• Health chip: displays the skill’s 7-day average success rate as a green (70+), yellow (40–69), or red (below 40) dot. Brand-new skills without enough run data show no dot.
• Lineage badge: shown on skills derived from another skill. It tells you who made the original and how many contributors were involved — read-only, no action needed.

What the agent handles on its own

The following all happen without you having to do anything.

Auto-suggest: After finishing a task, the agent reviews its own notes, repeated patterns, and failed skill signals to look for marketplace skills that might help. From candidates that are active, not yet installed, and above a health threshold, the top scorers are ranked and — only if they clear the 75-point bar — presented as a suggestion card.

Self-patch: When the agent finds a concrete defect in a skill it has installed from the marketplace, it applies an exact fix. The patch must match exactly one place in the file; after applying, the skill’s structure is re-validated. If validation fails, the change is automatically rolled back. A version snapshot is saved on each successful patch; the skill’s owner can roll back to any previous version from the skill’s version history view.

3-way defect routing: When the agent reports a skill problem, it is automatically classified and routed. Official system skills go to the platform admin queue. Skills the user has forked queue up for the agent’s self-patch. All other marketplace skills accumulate evidence in a proposal for the author. Reports of the same issue within 7 days are merged into one proposal, and each user-and-skill combination is capped at 5 reports per day.

Four skill notifications

To enable or disable individual notifications, go to Notification Settings.

Ready to go further?

If you’d like to package a workflow your agent nailed into a reusable skill — or publish one to the marketplace — see Creating Skills.

Advanced

The material below is not required for everyday use. Refer to it only if you need to understand internal skill behaviour or debug an issue.

Creating a skill — the DRAFT review modal

When an agent packages a workflow into a skill, a draft is first saved behind the scenes and a review modal appears in the interface. You confirm or edit the details, then click to create the skill (private or published to the marketplace). If you cancel, the draft is deleted immediately.

Installing a marketplace skill — content preview first

The first time an agent tries to install a marketplace skill, the full skill description and bundled file list are shown to you before anything is installed. The agent then proceeds to the actual install request, which still requires your approval before it takes effect.

Lazy loading of skill content

A skill’s full instructions are not always present in the agent’s context. The first time the agent runs a skill in a session, it fetches the complete README body and receives it in the tool result. Subsequent calls within the same conversation segment return only a short receipt — the body is already in the conversation history. When the history is filed (a new segment begins), the next execution fetches the full body again. The agent’s system-level instructions always hold only the frontmatter summary (a short description block); the full body travels exclusively through the execution result channel.

Installation slots: reference vs. your own copy

When you install a skill for the first time, it is registered as a reference pointing at the original. If the agent later self-patches that skill, a personal copy is created and the agent switches to that copy’s slot automatically. This transition requires no action from you.

UpServe skills are compatible with the AgentSkills standard, so you can exchange them as zip files with Claude Code, Cursor, Goose, and other compliant clients. For the full spec — directory layout, SKILL.md frontmatter, and secret injection — see Creating Skills → Advanced.