What are Skills?

Skills are repeatable workflows that let you codify how a specific type of task should be handled. Think of a skill like a playbook: a set of steps and instructions that an agent follows when it encounters a matching situation. Skills help you get consistent, repeatable behavior across workflows in the product.

How to create a skill

The most natural way to create a skill is by using the Assist Agent. As you go back and forth with the Assist Agent on a particular type of issue, you'll develop a sequence of steps that works well — investigating in a certain way, checking specific tools, formatting replies in a specific style. Once you've landed on a workflow that works, you can ask the Assist Agent to "turn this into a skill" and it will capture the steps into a reusable skill.

You can talk with the agent on the Skills page to directly make a skill.

Importing skills

If you already use skills in tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or other AI tools, you can import them directly into Pylon. Skills are markdown files, so you can always upload your existing .md files on the Skills page and they'll be available to all your Pylon agents.

How to use skills

Once created, skills can be used across all of Pylon's agents:

• Assist Agent — invoke a skill on-demand by typing / followed by the skill name, or just ask the Assist Agent to run it.

• Background Agents — you can give a background agent access to a set of skills to automate work. For example, the out-of-the-box issue Issue Investigator background agent has access to the investigate skill so that every new issue is pre-investigated before your team arrives.

Agents can also invoke skills automatically when they detect a matching scenario — no manual trigger needed. Within each agent you can control what skills are available.

Examples

Here are some common types of skills teams create:

• Investigation workflows — check specific data sources, logs, or codebase locations for a type of issue

• Escalation procedures — follow a specific process when escalating to engineering or another team

• Triage workflows — classify and route issues based on specific criteria