tags: #help #skills #agents
description: Skills are the instructions your AI agents get when they start. See each role's skill against its budget, search the skill index, and improve it.
brief: Skills are what your AI agents are told when they start: one per role (designer, coder, tester…). The Skills page shows each one against its budget, the Skill index finds the part that does a job, and Skill searches says what to improve.

AI agent skills: what your agents are told¶✎ edit

A skill is the instructions an AI agent gets: how its role works, the rules it follows and how to call AI Putty. Every agent starts with its role's skill (the designer's, the coder's, the tester's…), made from AI Putty's base skills plus your project's own Skill:Project, and pulls more parts as a task needs them.

Three pages show them. Each has a blue ? by its title that leads here.

See what each agent gets¶✎ edit

Skills has one line per role: the size of the start it is served, against the role's budget, and what was cut to fit.

Click a role to see the blocks its start is made of, and the exact text.
Who pulled how much shows which agents pulled which extra parts, and how big they were.
Only published skills show. A draft skill appears once it is published.

Find the part of a skill that does a job¶✎ edit

Skill index lists every keyed section of the skills, with two searches:

Skills: type what an agent would ask, e.g. review my tickets. You get up to three matching sections. An agent pins the one it needs to its chat, so it doesn't load the whole skill.
Everything: searches topics, items, the Spec, chats and thoughts.
Plain index is the bare list an agent sees, per role. Pinned in this chat shows a chat's pins when you give its id.
The calls each search makes are listed at the bottom, for your own AI.

Make the skills better¶✎ edit

Skill searches shows what agents (and crawlers) search for in the skill index, and what that says to change:

Index test: try a search the way an agent would and see exactly what it gets back, and why. Nothing is logged or pinned.
Weekly review: every Monday, suggestions from last week's searches, each with its evidence: move a section into an agent's start or out of it, or add the phrases agents searched with when they missed. Tick the ones you want, then Apply ticked.
Our agents, Crawlers and Keys health: the sessions, the outside searches, and the sections that are rarely found.
Nothing changes a skill by itself: Apply writes a skill draft (and a pipeline item for a bigger change), and nothing is live until you publish it.

Parts of this page still show sample data, marked as such, until their reports are built.

Good to know¶✎ edit

Why a budget? Every word in an agent's start costs tokens on every run. A small start with the rest found by search is faster and cheaper.
Who may change a skill? Skill drafts need your approval to publish. See Permissions.
Related: Working with AI agents, The agents board, Drafts.