Skills

A skill is a procedure Abhed should follow when a request matches it: how your team cuts a release, the checklist for a schema migration, the house format for an incident report. It is knowledge that does not belong in code.

Format

A folder with a SKILL.md:

---
name: go-release
description: Cut a tagged release — version bump, changelog, tag, verification.
  Use when asked to release, cut a version, or ship a build.
---

# Cutting a release

1. **Confirm the tree is clean.** `git status --porcelain`. Never tag a dirty tree.
2. **Run the tests.** A release with failing tests is not a release. Report the
   actual output.
3. **Determine the version** from the last tag, per semver.
4. **Tag and verify** with `git describe --tags`.

This is the Agent Skills format. A skill written for another harness that uses it will load here unchanged.

"skills": { "dirs": ["~/.abhed/skills", ".abhed/skills"] }

Why only the description is in the prompt

Abhed puts each skill's name and description in the system prompt, about fifteen tokens each, and loads the body only when the agent calls the skill tool. Twenty skills of a thousand tokens each would otherwise cost 20,000 tokens on every request of every session, whether or not any of them was relevant.

The consequence is that the description is the whole interface. It decides whether a skill is ever used. Say when to use it, not what it is.

Where skills come from

Only directories the operator configured — never the workspace the agent is editing. A skill body is instructions by construction, so a repository that could carry its own skills could carry its own instructions to the agent reading it.

Writing one that works

Skills are followed by the model, not executed by the harness, and a smaller model follows a long conditional procedure unreliably. If a step must always happen, that is a job for an extension or a tool, not a paragraph.

What works: numbered steps, one action each; explicit stop conditions; naming what to report rather than assuming. What does not: several pages of prose, or a rule stated once in the middle and expected to hold.