Skills
The Skills tab inside Operations is the actionable catalogue: every skill installed on this instance, filterable by operator, pack, or scope, and dispatchable from the same view. Where Library is about the installed capability (its identity, its manifest, its inspector), Skills is about doing something with it.
What A Skill Is
Section titled “What A Skill Is”A skill is a named piece of work the user can dispatch — a job description for an agent. Each skill declares its input contract (the typed ContextPacket fields it needs), its tool surface (which capabilities it may call), its scope requirements (which domains/scope tags its caller must hold), and its model tier (what kind of model it expects to run).
See Skill and ContextPacket for the substrate definitions.
What The Skills Tab Shows
Section titled “What The Skills Tab Shows”- Every installed skill, grouped or sortable by operator, by pack, and by scope.
- For each skill: identity, the pack it comes from, the operator it sits under, the scopes it requires, and last-run status if any.
- A dispatch affordance — picking a skill from this tab opens the dispatch flow with that skill pre-selected. The user fills in the runtime ContextPacket fields and confirms.
Dispatching From Here
Section titled “Dispatching From Here”The dispatch flow from the Skills tab is the same flow you would get from Chat or from a workflow node; the only difference is starting point. The platform still:
- Assembles the ContextPacket from your declared scopes and the skill’s contract.
- Routes the dispatch to a provider matching the skill’s model tier and the host’s policy.
- Records the run as Activity, with full audit (inputs, outputs, costs, tool calls).
- Applies pack-declared and user-declared guardrails before producing side effects.
Nothing about dispatching from Skills bypasses scope, audit, or review gates.
How Skills Differs From Chat
Section titled “How Skills Differs From Chat”Chat is conversational and routes through your Chief of Staff or Personal Assistant. Skills is direct: pick the named piece of work, dispatch it. Use Skills when you already know what you want done; use Chat when you want the platform to decide.
Troubleshooting
Section titled “Troubleshooting”| Symptom | Where To Check |
|---|---|
| Skill missing | Library to confirm the operator + pack are installed; Settings → Packs to confirm the pack is enabled. |
| Skill refuses to dispatch | The skill’s scope requirements vs your current scope membership. |
| Skill dispatches but produces no result | Activity for the run, then Status for provider/plugin readiness. |
Related concepts
Section titled “Related concepts”- Library — the catalogue + inspector view of the same installed surface
- Agency model — how a dispatch composes typed primitives into authorised work
- Scope and ACL — why a skill may refuse to run for a given caller