Skills

Skills are reusable capabilities that agents can use to accomplish specific types of work. Think of them as tools in a toolbox — an agent picks up the skills it needs for each task.

What is a skill?

A skill is a set of instructions that teaches an agent how to do something specific. Examples:

• PDF export — generate PDF documents from content
• Presentation builder — create slide decks (PPTX)
• Code review — systematic code review with specific criteria
• Web research — search the web and synthesize findings
• Internal communications — draft professional emails and memos

Skills are defined as SKILL.md files — markdown documents with instructions, examples, and procedures.

The three tiers

Skills follow a trust hierarchy. Higher-trust skills are resolved first.

Certified skills

Verified and maintained by the Exponential team. These are pre-installed and auto-resolve — no confirmation needed. They cover common, high-value capabilities.

Examples: pdf, pptx, xlsx, docx, internal-comms.

Local skills

Skills you create and store on your machine. They're discovered automatically from:

• ~/.claude/skills/{skill-name}/SKILL.md — available globally
• your-project/.claude/skills/{skill-name}/SKILL.md — available in that project only

Local skills resolve after certified skills but before community skills.

Community skills

Skills shared by other users through repositories. These require user confirmation before installation — you review what the skill does before granting access.

Community skills are the lowest trust tier but offer the broadest coverage.

How skill resolution works

When an agent plans a task, Exponential automatically figures out which skills are needed:

1. Agent proposes a plan — the plan describes what needs to happen.
2. System detects capabilities — based on the plan, Exponential identifies which skills would be useful.
3. Resolution order — certified → local → community. The first match wins.
4. User confirmation — for community skills, you see a prompt showing which skills will be used.
5. Skills loaded — the resolved skills are made available to the agent during execution.

This means agents gain capabilities dynamically based on what the task needs — you don't have to manually configure which skills each agent has access to.

Writing your own skills

You can create custom skills for your specific workflows. A skill is just a SKILL.md file:

---
name: My Custom Skill
description: Does a specific thing for my project
tools: [bash, read, write]
tags: [custom, internal]
---

## Steps

1. First, do this...
2. Then, do that...

## Examples

Here's an example of the expected output...

See the Managing Skills guide for a full walkthrough, and the Skill File Format reference for the complete specification.

Skills vs. agent knowledge

Skills and agent knowledge are different:

Think of knowledge as what the agent knows inherently, and skills as what it learns to do for a specific task.