Skills & rules
Once an agent has tools and knowledge, you’ll want to shape how it works — its habits, its standards, your team’s way of doing things. Skills and rules are the two tools for that. They sound similar but play different parts.
Skills
Section titled “Skills”A skill is a reusable bundle of capability — a packaged set of instructions (and sometimes steps) that an agent can call on to do one thing well. Instead of re-explaining a task every time, you teach it once as a skill and reuse it everywhere.
Think of a skill like a recipe card in the agent’s kitchen drawer: pull it out whenever that dish is on the menu.
Examples:
- A “Summarize meeting” skill that turns a transcript into decisions, action items, and owners.
- A “Create tasks from notes” skill that reads a doc and files clean, well-titled tasks.
Because skills are reusable, several agents can share the same one, and you can improve a skill in one place to upgrade every agent that uses it.
A rule is a conditional instruction — guidance that applies when a certain situation is true. Rules are how you encode “in this case, always do it this way.”
Examples:
- “When replying to a customer, always keep the tone friendly and never promise a refund without approval.”
- “When working in the Finance project, double-check numbers against the source database before posting.”
Where a skill is a capability the agent can use, a rule is a guardrail the agent must follow when its condition matches.
Teaching an agent your team’s way
Section titled “Teaching an agent your team’s way”Together, skills and rules are how an agent stops being generic and starts feeling like yours. Encode the playbook your best teammate follows — the steps they take and the standards they hold — and the agent will follow it consistently, every time, without getting tired or cutting corners.