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Skills

Skills are instructions the Assistant loads only when a task needs them. They follow the Agent Skills format, so skills written for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other clients work unchanged.

The chat sees each skill's name and description. When a task matches, the model calls the activate_skill tool to load the full instructions, and can read files bundled with the skill through the same tool. Skills require a model that supports tool calling.

Adding Skills

Agent Skills folders

Any page named SKILL inside a folder under Library/AISkills/ is a skill:

Library/AISkills/
└── pdf-processing/
    ├── SKILL.md
    ├── references/REFERENCE.md
    └── scripts/extract.py

SKILL.md needs a name and description in its frontmatter:

---
name: pdf-processing
description: Extract text from PDFs. Use when the user mentions PDFs.
---

# PDF Processing

See references/REFERENCE.md for field names.

To scan other folders, set ai.skills.paths:

config.set("ai", {
  skills = { paths = {"Library/AISkills/", "Skills/"} }
})

Tagged pages

A page anywhere in the space tagged #meta/aiSkill with a description is also a skill. Its name is the last segment of the page name, and its subpages are its bundled files.

---
tags: meta/aiSkill
description: Run my weekly review. Use when the user asks for a weekly review.
---

1. List tasks completed this week...

If a folder skill and a tagged page share a name, the folder skill is used.

Installing Skills

AI: Import Skill

Paste a GitHub skill folder URL, e.g. https://github.com/anthropics/skills/tree/main/skills/pdf, to import all of its files. Any other URI to a SKILL.md imports just that file. The SKILL.md gets Share frontmatter (share.uri, share.mode: pull, share.hash).

AI: Update Skill

Pick an imported skill to pull its SKILL.md through Share, which skips unchanged skills and asks before overwriting local edits. When SKILL.md changed, bundled files from GitHub are downloaded again. Files removed upstream are not deleted. Share: Page on a SKILL page updates only the SKILL.md.

Library: Install

Skills can be published as a SilverBullet library. Create a meta/library page under Library/AISkills/ and list the skill files under files:

---
name: Library/AISkills/myuser/PDF Skills
tags: meta/library
files:
- pdf-processing/SKILL.md
- pdf-processing/references/REFERENCE.md
---

Agents and MCP

Agents can include or exclude activate_skill like any other tool, which turns all skills on or off for that agent. activate_skill is also exposed through the MCP Server.

Limitations

  • Bundled scripts can be read but not run, because the Assistant has no shell.
  • The allowed-tools frontmatter field is ignored.