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What Are Skills?

Skills are portable, version-controlled packages of knowledge that extend the agent’s capabilities to perform domain-specific tasks. When you start a conversation in Kombai, the agent sees the names, descriptions, and file paths of all available skills. If your task matches a skill’s description, the agent then reads the entire SKILL.md file and follows the instructions while performing the task. You can also invoke a skill explicitly by typing /skill-name in the chat input.

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Benefits of Skills

Human-Readable

Skills are just plain Markdown files that anyone on your team can read, review, and improve.

Cross-Agent Compatible

Skills work across all AI agents that support the Agent Skills Open Standard.

Flexible & Extensible

Skills can be lightweight instructions or complex packages with scripts, docs, templates, and other assets as needed.

Portable & Shareable

Skills are self-contained folders that can easily be distributed across projects, teams, or the broader community.

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How to create a Skill

  1. Create a folder inside .kombai/skills/ in your project (or ~/.kombai/skills/ for global skills).
  2. Add a SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter (name, description) and Markdown instructions.
  3. Kombai now detects the new skill automatically via a filesystem watcher. You don’t have to reload the IDE.

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How Kombai uses a Skill

  1. Discovery: When you start a conversation, the frontmatter (name, description, filepath) of all the available skills is added to the context.
  2. Evaluation: The agent evaluates your request against all descriptions.
  3. Activation: If the agent determines a skill clearly matches the assigned task, it adds the full SKILL.md to the context.
  4. Execution: The agent follows the instructions in the skill to perform the task.

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Skill directories

Skills are automatically loaded from these locations:
LocationPathScope
Global~/.kombai/skills/ or ~/.agents/skills/Personal. Available in all projects.
Project<workspace>/.kombai/skills/ or <workspace>/.agents/skills/Team. Version-controlled.

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Mode-specific Skills

You can create a skill that only appears in a specific mode using the directory naming pattern skills-{mode}: 
.kombai/
├── skills/              # Available in all modes
├── skills-ask/          # Ask mode only
├── skills-code/         # Code mode only
├── skills-plan/         # Plan mode only
└── skills-debug/        # Debug mode only

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Example command to create a mode-specific Skill

# For Code mode only
mkdir -p .kombai/skills-code/typescript-patterns

# For Plan mode only
mkdir -p .kombai/skills-plan/microservices

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Skill folder structure

SKILL.md is the only required file in the Skills folder. You can optionally include additional resources: 
my-skill/
├── SKILL.md         # Main instructions file
├── scripts/         # Executable code the skill can invoke
├── references/      # Supplementary docs loaded on demand
└── assets/          # Templates, design tokens, examples