Bot skills

A skill is a recipe a bot may follow: the checklist for a weekly report, the steps for a support triage, the way your team wants a summary written. Instead of carrying every procedure in its head all the time, the bot reads the recipe when a job calls for it. The panel puts it plainly: Recipes this bot may follow. Each one is scanned before it can be turned on. Skills are about how a job is done. They are not permissions and they are not a schedule. This page covers where skills come from, the scan that stands between a recipe and a switch, enabling one on a bot, running a skill directly, and the three things a skill is often confused with.

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Where skills come from

Open a bot and go to its Skills panel. The Catalog lists every skill on the account, each with its state, and an account with none reads No skills on this account yet. While the list loads you see Loading skills…. There are two kinds of row.

• Per-bot skills. A switch reading On or Off, with Enable and Turn off to change it. Enabling is per bot, so one bot can follow a recipe while another never sees it. You need to be signed in to change a switch.
• Account-managed skills. These render with no switch at all, marked Always on. They are set for the account rather than per bot.

You can also add to the catalog yourself. A skill you authored that has the same name as one Cortex bundles takes precedence, so overriding a default is a matter of writing your own with that name. The quickest way to produce one for a bot is to show it the job on its own computer: see Teach from a demonstration, which ends in Save and enable. Authoring recipes by hand is covered on Chat skills, since the same recipe file can be enabled for Cortex Chat and for Cortex Bot.

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The scan is a gate, not a warning

Every skill is checked before it can be turned on, and the result decides what the row even offers you. Two checks run: a static pass over the file and a bounded review by a model. Enable appears only for a clean verdict. Everywhere else the affordance is Enable anyway, which shows each finding with its line number and a redacted quote, and sends your acknowledgement along with the change. Turning on a flagged recipe is recorded as a decision you made, not as a switch that happened to be flipped. There are seven kinds of finding, and this is the whole list. If a change cannot be saved you get That change could not be saved. and the switch stays where it was.

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Enable a skill

You can also pick a bot’s skills while you create it: the New bot form has a Skills section that says Skills this bot may run. Distinct from connectors. Everything on that form can be changed later. See Create a bot.

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How a bot picks one, and how you run one yourself

A bot reaches its skills through a tool of its own. That tool lists the skills that are enabled and reads one recipe by name, so the bot looks at what is available, reads the relevant recipe, and then follows it. Nothing forces a match: asking for a skill by name in the conversation is the reliable way to get the one you meant. You can also run a skill directly rather than describing the job. Running one starts a full bot turn, the same as sending a message, and the turn is marked as having been started by a skill rather than by you. Because it is a normal turn, everything else about a turn applies: there is no round limit, the same fifteen-minute deadline holds, and consequential steps still park for a decision. A skill can be put on a schedule, which is where the two features meet. A routine built from a saved skill simply has Run the saved skill {slug}. as its instruction, so the schedule decides when and the recipe decides how. See Routines.

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A skill grants nothing

This is the part worth internalising. A recipe is instructions, not capability. Enabling a skill adds no tool to the bot, no connected app, and no permission. A skill that tells the bot to run a command still parks that command behind Allow, Deny or Always. A skill that tells it to change something in a connected app still parks that change. A skill that names a tool the bot was never given simply has nothing to call. The recipe describes the job; Approvals and tool policy decides whether each step runs.

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What a skill is not

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Related

• Teach from a demonstration - record yourself doing a job and save the draft as a skill.
• Routines - put a skill on a schedule.
• Approvals and tool policy - why a skill cannot approve its own steps.
• Bot tools - the tool a bot uses to list and read its recipes.
• Chat skills - authoring a recipe, and using the same one in Cortex Chat.
• Create a bot - choosing skills on the New bot form.