Skills
A page of instructions an agent reads before a certain kind of job — written once, read by every agent on the machine.
Every team has things that are only true of them: how code is written here, how
a release goes out, what "done" means, which three files you always forget.
A skill is one page saying one of those things, and it is handed to the
agents rather than repeated in every message.
What a skill is
A page with a name, one line saying when to use it, and the instructions
themselves. deploy. house-style. writing-migrations.
An agent reads it at the moment it needs it, for the job that needs it. What
reaches a prompt is a short pointer saying which pages exist and how to open
one; the page itself is fetched by the agent that wants it.
Under three hundred tokens a turn, and the page can be re-read halfway through a
job.
Writing one
settings → skills. The screen has a chat of its own: say what the rule is
and let it write the page, then read it and fix the bits it got wrong. That is
faster than typing a page of instructions with your thumbs.
Or write it yourself. It is markdown.
Machine or project
Same as everywhere else here. A project skill knows that codebase; a machine
skill is the general one you want everywhere. A project skill wins over a
machine skill with the same name.
Handing them over
The pointer has to be written into the files each agent reads — AGENTS.md,
CLAUDE.md, and each CLI's own home file. One press does it:
beafk skills load # write the pointer where the agents here read it
beafk skills load --files # …and commit the pages into this repository
--files is for an agent that has no beafk on its PATH — a CI job, somebody
else's laptop. On a machine that can run the command, the binary is enough.
The panel has the same thing under settings → skills, including the exact
block your context window pays for.
beafk's own skills
beafk ships pages about itself — how to read the logs, how to check the machine,
how to add a command, how to set variables, how to run a crew, how to
hold the files it is editing. Every agent on the machine
can read them, which is why "add the deploy command to the launcher" works
without you explaining what a launcher is.
beafk skills # what this machine can be asked for
beafk skills show read-logs # one of them, in full
Those pages are compiled into the program, so they describe the version that is
running. Updating beafk updates them.
Skills are one of four things beafk describes once and delivers to every agent —
see keeping every CLI in sync.