Skills

Skills are a specialised capability type designed for direct invocation — by users via slash commands (/skill_name) or by agents during task execution. They are the primary way to extend what agents can do from the marketplace.

Skills vs Capabilities

	Skills	Capabilities
Invocation	Slash command or agent call	Agent call only
Discovery	Marketplace registry (skills.json)	Filesystem scan
Scope	User-facing, interactive	Internal agent logic
Configuration	JSON registry entry	capability.yaml file

Skills are capabilities with type: skill — the distinction is primarily in how they are surfaced and invoked.

Finding skills

Open the Capabilities panel → Skills tab (Agents dropdown → Capabilities). The tab shows all available skills from the marketplace with:

• Name and description
• Author and version
• Category and tags
• Status (enabled / disabled)

Use the search bar to filter by name, description, or author. Filter by category to browse a specific domain.

Installing a skill

Click a skill in the marketplace list to view details, then click Download. The skill is installed to ~/.codebolt/skills.json and becomes available globally.

Using a skill

Once installed, a skill can be invoked:

• Via slash command — type /skill_name in the chat input. Codebolt routes the command to the matching skill.
• By an agent — agents that know a skill is available can invoke it by name during their reasoning loop.

Skill registry format

The skills registry (~/.codebolt/skills.json) is a flat list:

[
  {
    "skill_id": "summarise-pr",
    "unique_id": "summarise-pr@1.0.0",
    "name": "Summarise PR",
    "description": "Generates a pull request summary from the diff and commit history",
    "author": "codeboltai",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "category": "git",
    "tags": ["git", "pr", "summarisation"],
    "status": true
  }
]

Set "status": false to disable a skill without uninstalling it.