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IntroductionCore conceptsSkill

Skill

A skill is a small, reusable behaviour pack. It has a short slug, a one-line description, a body of instructions written in plain English, and optional templates the agent should reference (called seed assets). Skills are how TeamMate handles “the same workflow, but for many agents and many situations” without copy-pasting the same paragraphs into every agent’s instructions document.

Concrete example: a weekly-status-update skill that tells the agent how to compose a structured weekly update — wins, blockers, next steps. Three different agents (HR, Sales, Engineering) can load the same skill when a user asks “draft my weekly update” and get a consistent format.

How a skill is different from instructions

  • Instructions live on the agent. They describe who the agent is. They run for every message.
  • Skills live in the workspace’s skill library. They describe one behaviour the agent can opt into. They run only when loaded — either ahead of time (attached to the agent) or on demand (the agent picks one up mid-conversation through load_skill).

Think of skills as the colleague’s notebook of “how I do X” — pulled out when needed.

How a skill is different from a tool

  • Tools are programmatic — they execute code, hit an API, read a file. The agent doesn’t write them; it calls them.
  • Skills are textual — they’re instructions written in English. The agent reads them and follows the steps.

Sometimes a skill uses a tool. For example, the skill-creator skill that ships with the product walks the agent through using the create_skill, update_skill, and delete_skill tools. The skill is the playbook; the tools are the actions.

How a skill is different from an agent

  • An agent is a whole employee with identity, model, knowledge, tools, and channels.
  • A skill is one trick. It has no identity of its own — it always runs as part of an agent.

A useful test: if you can imagine the same behaviour being useful to three different agents, it’s probably a skill. If only one agent ever needs it, just write it into that agent’s instructions.

Two scopes

Skills live at one of two scopes:

  • Workspace skills — authored by you (or via the skill-creator) for your team’s specific needs. Visible only to your workspace.
  • Platform skills — shipped with TeamMate. Available to every workspace. Examples: the skill-creator playbook, common artifact-generation skills, the standard skill-asset helpers.

You can only edit / delete workspace skills; platform skills are admin-managed.

When to use a skill

  • You catch yourself writing the same 10-line instruction block into three different agents.
  • A workflow has reusable sub-steps (“first do A, then B, then C”) that you’d want to update in one place.
  • You want a known-good behaviour bundle that the SuperAgent can discover and load via search_skills when a user asks for it.

When not to use a skill

  • The behaviour is unique to one agent. Just put it in that agent’s instructions.
  • The behaviour is a one-shot request, not a repeatable playbook. Just ask in chat.
AgentTool & capability