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Creating Skills

Skills are reusable instructions that sandbox agents can load when a task matches the skill's purpose. They are not API tools and they do not grant new network access by themselves. Use them for repeatable procedures, repo-specific operating knowledge, QA playbooks, investigation steps, or formatting rules.

Put organization skills in an overlay repo under .agents/skills/. See Using an overlay for packaging, mount paths, and chart configuration.

Skills are loaded from CENTAUR_SKILL_DIRS in the sandbox. In a repo-cache overlay deployment, they must exist under the source's skillsSubdir — by default .agents/skills/ — in the sandbox repo checkout, for example /home/agent/github/your-org/centaur-overlay/.agents/skills. The sandbox entrypoint copies those skills into the agent workspace during startup; a source without the directory is skipped.

Write SKILL.md

Keep the entrypoint concise and action-oriented:

# Incident Response
 
Use this skill when investigating a production incident, failed rollout, or
service outage.
 
## Workflow
 
1. Identify the affected service, namespace, and timeframe.
2. Check rollout history and current pod health.
3. Inspect logs around the first failure.
4. State root cause, blast radius, and recovery path.

Add references only when they save context. Put long runbooks in references/, scripts in scripts/, and examples in examples/.

What belongs in a skill

Good skills:

  • encode a repeated workflow
  • say when they should be used
  • point at local scripts or references
  • keep the first page short
  • avoid secrets and credentials

Avoid using skills for tool credentials, API clients, or durable automation. Those belong in tools, secret configuration, and workflows.

Verify

Start an agent with the overlay loaded and ask it to inspect available skills. For a running sandbox, the agent can confirm overlay state with:

echo "$CENTAUR_SKILL_DIRS"
find /workspace/.agents/skills -maxdepth 2 -type f -name SKILL.md | sort

If a skill is missing, check the configured repo/ref, the rendered CENTAUR_SKILL_DIRS, and that the skill directory contains SKILL.md.