Teach it a recipe once. It keeps it forever.

Teach it once. Any agent you grant it can do it.

Think of the difference this way. An agent is a specialist — a person you have hired for a kind of work. A skill is a capability that person can pick up: a named recipe for one repeatable task. An inbox-keeper agent might hold the skills for “draft a reply in my voice” and “flag anything urgent”; a researcher might hold “read around a topic” and “write a sourced summary”.

The reason to separate them is reuse. A skill lives in a shared library, not locked inside one agent. Teach “file this properly” once and you can grant it to every agent that ought to have it — and improving it in one place improves it for all of them.

You never write any of this out as fields — you describe it and 1Presence shapes it — but under the hood a skill is three plain things:

Because it is all plain language, a skill is something you can open and read on its own page — see exactly what it does, which agents hold it, and when it last ran.

The same way you do everything else here: you say what you want in your own words, and 1Presence turns it into something precise, asking a sharp question or two where it needs to.

1. 1

   Describe the pattern

   Say what the task is, when it should fire, and roughly what it should produce — a sentence or two is plenty.

2. 2

   Answer a question or two

   1Presence checks the details that matter — the exact trigger, where the output should land, whether to include a source — right there in the chat.

3. 3

   It saves it to your library

   The skill is written up in plain language and filed, with its own page you can open and read any time.

4. 4

   Grant it to the agents that need it

   Hand the skill to one agent or several. Each one can now reach for it when the moment fits.

A quick way to choose. Reach for a skill when you want to capture one repeatable task — a thing you explain the same way each time and want done consistently. Reach for a whole agent when you want a standing specialist with its own focus, voice and set of skills — an inbox-keeper, a researcher — that you talk to directly and that gets better at its job over time.

They compose. A specialist agent is really an identity plus a handful of skills plus the connectors it can reach. And once you have a shelf of skills, building the next workflow becomes a matter of arranging what you already have, not inventing from scratch.

You do not have to start from a blank page, either. The Catalog keeps a shelf of ready-made skills you can copy and then shape to fit — often the fastest way to see what a good skill looks like.