Skills Overview

Learn about YokeBot skills — the capabilities that define what your agents can do.

What Are Skills?

Skills are the discrete capabilities that agents can use to interact with the outside world. Without skills, an agent can only converse. With skills, it can search the web, generate images, read and write data tables, and much more.

Each skill is defined by a SKILL.md markdown file that describes the skill's name, parameters, and behavior. The engine reads these files at startup and makes the corresponding tools available to agents.

Skill Categories

CategoryExamples
SearchWeb search via Tavily or Brave
Media GenerationImage (Flux), Video (Kling/Wan), 3D (Hunyuan), Music (ACE-Step), Sound FX (MireloSFX)
DataSystem of Record CRUD, Knowledge Base queries, Text Embedding
External ToolsMCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations
CustomAny skill you define in a SKILL.md file

How Skills Are Assigned

When creating or editing an agent, you choose which skills it has access to from the skill picker. Only assigned skills appear in the agent's tool definitions during heartbeat reasoning. This keeps context sizes manageable and prevents agents from performing unintended actions.

Skill Execution

When an agent decides to use a skill during a heartbeat or @mention response, the engine:

  1. Validates the parameters against the skill definition.
  2. Executes the underlying provider call (API request, database query, etc.).
  3. Returns the result to the LLM for further reasoning or final output.

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