Skills

Skills are focused knowledge modules that give an agent everything it needs for a specific type of work — instructions, workflows, and reference material — loaded when you kick off a task and dropped when it’s done, so you’re not re-explaining the same context every time.

Built-in and custom skills

Obvious ships with built-in skills that cover core capabilities: web hosting, folio building, data visualization, writing, and more. These are available to every agent automatically and update as the product evolves.

Custom skills are ones you create to capture knowledge specific to your work — an API integration you use regularly, a reporting format your team standardized on, a data cleaning workflow with particular business rules. The more custom skills you build, the less you re-explain context. Instead of describing your CRM data model every time you ask for pipeline analysis, the agent loads the skill that already knows it.

Creating a custom skill

You don’t write skill files by hand. Describe what you want to the agent — the workflow, the key steps, the phrases that should trigger it, and any rules it should always or never follow — and the skill builder takes it from there. It researches the domain, designs the skill structure, writes the documentation, tests any scripts, and validates the result. Once built, the skill is immediately available to every agent in your workspace.

The skill builder produces two things: a core guide that stays in the agent’s active context the whole time the skill is loaded, and a full reference document with the complete workflow, examples, and any scripts it tested. Review the output and ask for changes before it’s finalized. To update a skill later, ask the agent to revise it — you don’t need to rebuild from scratch. To start over entirely, delete the skill from the Skills page and rebuild.

Finding and managing your skills

Open Skills from the left sidebar to see every skill available in your workspace — built-in and custom — along with each skill’s description and triggers. From here you can import new skills and manage skills you own.

To delete a skill, click the ⋯ menu on the skill card and select Delete. Deleting a skill removes it from the agent index immediately — the agent won’t load it again. Delete only appears on skills you own.

Sharing a skill

To share a custom skill, click the ⋯ menu on the skill card and select Share. This option only appears on skills you own. A Share skill window opens with four visibility options:

• Private — only you can see this skill
• Team — shared with your team (requires you to have a team set up)
• Workspace — available to everyone in your workspace
• Public — published to the marketplace

Select the visibility you want and click Save.

Importing a skill

You can bring a skill in two ways. If you have a skill packaged as a ZIP file, open the Skills page and select Upload ZIP — Obvious validates the structure and makes it available immediately. If you have a URL (a GitHub repo, a raw file, or a Gist), select Import from Link and paste it in.

Note: Import from Link is in beta. Contact help@obvious.ai if you don’t see it in your workspace.

Related articles

• Writing Custom Skills — creating repo-level skills for use with Autobuild.