Skills

Sovereign mind. Skills are knowledge you author and own. They are Markdown files in your own folders, not a feature a platform grants and can take away, so they keep working when you change models or providers. See what makes an agent sovereign.

A tool lets the agent do something, like run a command. A skill teaches it how to do something well: a workflow, a house style, the steps for a particular system. The agent sees a one-line description of each enabled skill and reads the full instructions only when a task calls for them.

Built-in skills

Managing skills

Open Skills in the app's navigation to browse every skill Suzent found, read it, and switch it on or off. Click Reload from disk after adding or editing skill files.

Adding skills

Ask the agent. The quickest way is to say "install the skill at github.com/owner/repo" or "create a skill for how I like release notes written". The built-in installer and creator skills take it from there.

Or add a folder yourself. A skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file. Put it in ~/.suzent/skills/:

~/.suzent/skills/
└── release-notes/
    ├── SKILL.md          # Required
    ├── scripts/          # Optional helper scripts
    ├── references/       # Optional longer documents
    └── assets/           # Optional templates, images, data

SKILL.md starts with a short header, followed by plain Markdown instructions:

---
name: release-notes
description: Write release notes in our house style. Use when drafting or editing release notes.
---

# Release notes

## Style

- Lead with what changed for users, not how.
- Group changes under Added, Changed, and Fixed.

## Checklist

- Link each item to its pull request.

The description decides when the agent reaches for the skill, so say both what it does and when to use it. Keep the body short and practical, and move long material into references/.

Where Suzent finds skills

• Bundled skills that ship with Suzent.
• User skills in ~/.suzent/skills/.
• Repository skills in the project you are working in: a skills/ folder, or .claude/skills/, .agents/skills/, .codex/skills/, or .grok/skills/. Skills written for other agents that use the same SKILL.md format work as they are.
• Custom folders listed in the SKILLS_DIR environment variable.

Suzent also follows AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files in your working directory and its parent folders, the same way other coding agents do. The chat sidebar's Context tab shows which instructions are in effect.

Troubleshooting

A skill doesn't appear. Check that the file is named exactly SKILL.md, that the header has both name and description between --- lines, then click Reload from disk.

The agent never uses a skill. Make sure it is enabled, and make the description more specific about when it applies.