How Skills Work
Skills are reusable workflows for AI teammates. They capture instructions, scripts, and assets that should be applied consistently, and they are the best place to save repeatable work, team-specific policies, and tool usage patterns.
What skills are good for
Section titled “What skills are good for”Use skills for work that repeats:
- PR reviews.
- Support replies.
- Weekly reports.
- Candidate screening.
- Pipeline reviews.
- Marketing copy and SEO audits.
- Internal policy checks.
What a skill contains
Section titled “What a skill contains”| File or field | Purpose |
|---|---|
SKILL.md | The main Markdown instructions the agent reads when the skill is invoked. |
| Scripts | Optional executable files that support the skill. |
| Assets | Optional reference files, examples, templates, or other supporting material. |
| Handle | The slash-command-style identifier users can invoke. |
| Description | Helps people and the agent understand when to use the skill. |
Ways to create skills
Section titled “Ways to create skills”- Create a skill from teammate settings.
- Ask the teammate to create a skill in conversation.
- Import a skill from GitHub.
- Confirm a starting skill proposed by a template prompt during setup.
- Use built-in Type or harness skills when they already cover the workflow.
Template prompts propose skills; they do not provision them when selected. During setup, you can add, remove, or change the proposals before confirming creation. Type can also reuse a suitable existing workspace skill instead of creating a duplicate.
How skills are invoked
Section titled “How skills are invoked”People can invoke skills from the composer with slash-command-style handles. You can also mention an agent with a selected skill so the teammate knows which workflow should guide the response. A teammate can also use skill descriptions to decide when a skill is relevant.
Skillsets
Section titled “Skillsets”Skillsets are collections of skills. Adding a skillset to a teammate adds each skill in the collection to that teammate; it does not run an installer or copy a separate package.
Editing and GitHub sync
Section titled “Editing and GitHub sync”Skill creators can edit their own skills, admins can edit any skill, and other workspace members can propose changes. When a skill is backed by the shared GitHub registry, GitHub is the source of truth for accepted changes. Type records the change and keeps retrying registry publication or reconciliation so the app database eventually reflects the merged GitHub state.
Built-in skills
Section titled “Built-in skills”Some skills are built in by Type or provided by the teammate’s harness. These appear separately from teammate-authored skills and are enabled by default when available for that harness.
Managed AI teammates can use built-in skills for common creation workflows, including presentations, documents, spreadsheets, apps, and data visualization. Type-managed Claude SDK and Codex teammates generate images through Type’s generate_image tool backed by Type-managed OpenAI gpt-image-2, and can use image attachments as visual references for image edits or variants. Built-in skills guide the teammate to use the right connected tools, create native files such as .pptx, .docx, and .xlsx when appropriate, validate the output, and attach finished files back to the thread.
Managed Claude and Codex teammates can also use the built-in Remotion skill to create React video compositions as Type Video artifacts. Type builds a browser preview from the Remotion source and automatically queues MP4 export through Type’s self-hosted Render Workflow, so Download can use the cached export when it is ready. You can simply ask for a video; using /remotion is optional.
Skill hygiene
Section titled “Skill hygiene”Good skills are narrow, explicit, and easy to reuse. A support reply skill, a PR review skill, and a weekly marketing ideas skill should usually be separate skills because they use different inputs and produce different outputs.
Template prompt examples
Section titled “Template prompt examples”These are examples of skills a template prompt can propose. They are created only after you review and confirm the starting plan in the setup conversation.
| Template | Example proposed skills |
|---|---|
| Product Engineer | Bug Fixer, PR Review, Design Review |
| Data Analyst | User Growth Reporter, Revenue Reporter |
| Marketing Manager | Copywriting, Marketing Ideas, SEO Audit, Improve Ad Copy |
| Support Specialist | Support Ticket Responder, Support Trends Reporter |
| Sales Operations | Pipeline Overview, Deal Risk Reporter, Meeting Brief Generator |
| HR Partner | Candidate Sourcer, Candidate Screener, Team Sentiment Sweep |
Skills and connectors together
Section titled “Skills and connectors together”A skill can tell a teammate how to use a connector, but it should not contain secrets. Put credentials in connectors. Put workflow instructions in skills.