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Understanding Skills

Skills are reusable sets of instructions and tool capabilities that can be shared across multiple AI agents. They allow you to define complex instructions and /or workflows once and apply them to any agent, ensuring consistency and improving performance.

What is a Skill?​

A Skill in Ordify is more than just a prompt, it is a bundle that contains:

  1. Instructions: Step-by-step guidance or procedures that the agent follows to accomplish a task.
  2. Tools: A selection of specific tools (e.g., read email, create sheet, send message) from specific applications (e.g., Gmail, Google Sheets, Slack) that the agent needs to execute its tasks.

Why Use Skills?​

Using Skills offers several advantages over raw tool assignment or simple prompting:

  • Reduced Tool Bloat: Instead of loading every available tool from one or multiple applications into an agent, Skills allow you to load only the specific tools required for a particular workflow. This improves agent response speed and accuracy.
  • Reusable Knowledge: Once you've perfected a workflow (e.g., "Research and Summarize Competitors"), you can save it as a Skill and attach it to different agents without rewriting the instructions.
  • Cross-Agent Compatibility: Skills work seamlessly across agents, providing a consistent capability layer across the platform.
  • Content Injection: When a Skill is attached to an agent, its workflow instructions are automatically injected into the agent's backstory or system instructions, giving the agent clear procedural guidance.

Skills in the Library​

You can find and manage your Skills in the Library:

  • Public Skills: A curated collection of pre-built skills. You can use these as templates or inspiration for your own workflows.
  • My Skills: Your personal collection of custom-built skills. Here you can create, edit, archive, and share your own expertise.

How Skills Work​

When you attach a Skill to an agent:

  1. Selective Tool Loading: The system identifies the exact tools (e.g., GMAIL_SEND_EMAIL) defined in the Skill's schema and loads only those tools.
  2. Instruction Injection: The system appends the Skill's content (the procedural instructions) to the agent's backstory, ensuring the agent "remembers" the specific workflow it needs to follow.

Creating and Editing Skills​

You can create new Skills from the Library or the Agent Builder:

  1. Name & Description: Give your skill a clear name and purpose.
  2. Instructions: Write the instructions the agent should follow.
  3. Tool Selection: Select the specific apps and actions (tools) the skill requires.
  4. Tool Inference: Ordify can often auto-detect which tools your skill might need based on the instructions you've written.

Summary​

Skills are the "professional training" for your AI agents. By bundling instructions with the right tools, they transform general-purpose agents into specialized experts capable of executing complex, multi-step business processes with precision.