Skills

Skills are instruction sets loaded into an agent’s context window on demand. Package your coding standards, review criteria, domain knowledge, or any repeatable workflow into a SKILL.md file — agents load the right one for each task and follow it exactly. Skills are available globally across your Friday instance by default. You can also assign them to a specific space or job by referencing them in workspace.yml.

Adding skills

Open Skills in the Studio sidebar and click + Add. Two ways to add: Upload file / folder — drop a folder that contains a SKILL.md file, or click to browse. Friday reads the frontmatter and registers the skill. Import from skills.sh — paste an owner/repo/slug reference (e.g. anthropics/skills/pdf) and click Import skill. Browse the full registry at skills.sh.

Writing a skill

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file. The file starts with YAML frontmatter:

---
name: my-namespace/review-criteria
description: Applies code review standards for the payments team. Use when reviewing PRs touching the billing or payments modules.
---

Your instructions here...

Key rules:

name must be @namespace/skill-name format — lowercase, hyphens only
description drives skill discovery — write it in third person and include a clear trigger (“Use when…”)
Keep the body focused. The agent is already smart; only include what it would otherwise get wrong.

Publishing via CLI

friday skill publish -p ./my-skill-folder

The directory must contain a SKILL.md. The skill name is read from the frontmatter name field, or you can override it with --name @namespace/skill-name. Other CLI commands:

friday skill list                          # list all published skills
friday skill get @namespace/skill-name     # get skill details
friday skill versions @namespace/skill-name  # list all versions

Using skills in workspace.yml

Reference a published skill from your space:

workspace.yml

skills:
  - name: "@my-namespace/review-criteria"
  - name: "@my-namespace/sql-standards"
    version: 3   # pin to a specific version; omit for latest

Or define a skill inline without publishing it:

workspace.yml

skills:
  - name: quick-note
    inline: true
    description: Brief formatting rules for this space.
    instructions: |
      Always respond in bullet points. Keep each point under 15 words.

How agents load skills

At the start of a session, Friday injects an <available_skills> list into the agent’s context — each entry shows the skill name and its description. The agent calls the load_skill tool by name when it determines a skill is relevant to the current task. This is why the description field matters more than anything else in the file. It’s the only thing the agent sees before deciding whether to load a skill. Write it in third person with a clear trigger: what the skill covers and when to use it.

Getting started

Core concepts

Guides

Agent SDK

Reference

Resources

Adding skills

Writing a skill

Publishing via CLI

Using skills in workspace.yml

How agents load skills

​Adding skills

​Writing a skill

​Publishing via CLI

​Using skills in workspace.yml

​How agents load skills

Adding skills

Writing a skill

Publishing via CLI

Using skills in workspace.yml

How agents load skills