Skills

Skills are reusable instruction packages discovered from SKILL.md files.

They are different from source documents. A source gives knowledge. A skill gives behavior.

Source vs skill

Item	Purpose	Example
Source document	Ground the answer in content.	`istanbul-guide.md`, `refund-policy.md`, `runbook.pdf`
Skill	Tell the agent how to handle a class of tasks.	Trip planning rules, support escalation rules, incident review style

In the travel guide sample, source documents contain city guide material. The trip planning skill contains instructions for how to build practical itineraries from that material.

Register a skill source

Text

.AddSkills(skills => skills.FromFileSystem(
    id: "travel-skills",
    name: "Travel Skills",
    path: "./Skills"))

The discovery service looks for files named SKILL.md recursively under the skill source path.

Skill file format

The current parser expects YAML front matter followed by non-empty Markdown instructions.

Text

---
id: travel-planning
name: Travel Planning
description: Practical city trip planning behavior for source-grounded travel itineraries.
version: 1.0.0
tags:
  - travel
  - itinerary
  - city-guide
  - source-grounded
---

# Travel Planning Skill

Use this skill when the user asks for a city trip plan, travel itinerary,
short route, food-focused plan, family-friendly plan, outdoor route,
rainy-day alternative, or practical sightseeing schedule.

Prefer information retrieved from attached Context Space sources over general knowledge.
Keep plans realistic. Do not overload the day with too many distant locations.

How skills are used

When an agent uses a Context Space, Runiq discovers skills from attached skill sources. The active skills are added to the model instructions under Runiq Skills.

Skills are also emitted as stream events:

Event	Meaning
`skill_loaded`	Skill instructions were loaded for the run.
`context_provided`	Context Space metadata, skills, and sources were attached.

When to create a skill

Use a skill when the behavior should be reusable across agents or across many runs.

Good skill examples:

Skill	Use
Travel planning	How to structure realistic itineraries.
Support escalation	When to escalate and how to phrase customer-safe answers.
Incident review	How to summarize timeline, impact, root cause, and follow-ups.
Policy review	How to compare a request against policy documents.
Sales discovery	How to ask structured qualification questions.

Do not use a skill as a document dump. Put knowledge in sources. Put behavioral guidance in skills.

Dashboard preview

The skills view shows discovered SKILL.md packages, including their version, tags, source path, and the instruction content loaded for agent runs.