Equip agents with skills

Equip an agent with a skill when it needs a reusable procedure or reference material from the organization's skill library. The library stores the bundle; the agent's equipment determines which bundles are available to its runs.

Choose a skill for the task

A useful skill explains when to use it, how to perform the work, and what a good result looks like. For example, equip a release-note skill with the agent that prepares releases, then give it a small set of changes and check its output against your expected format.

The bundle contains SKILL.md and may include references, assets, or scripts. Importing it does not execute those files. Once equipped, its instructions can guide a coding agent that has a shell or other tools, including running a bundled script. Review the whole bundle before use; a skill does not add a separate permission boundary.

Equip a project agent

Open the project agent and select the needed skills in its equipment. The available list follows the project's access, even if you personally can read more skills:

Legacy private skills cannot be equipped on a project agent. The same access rule is checked when a task runs; selecting a skill does not grant the project permanent access to it.

A new project agent starts with the document skills docx, pptx, xlsx and pdf ticked when the project can access them. Untick those the job does not need.

Each skill in the list names who created it: a member, Built-in for the skills your organization starts with, or Configuration release with the member whose upload installed it. Check where an unfamiliar skill comes from before you equip it.

Use skills in an automation

An automation's agent nodes declare the skills they need. A run bound to a project uses that project's scope. An organization-level run can use organization skills only. Your personal membership in additional teams does not expand either scope.

During sandbox setup, Tale stages the equipped bundles as files and lists each skill with a description excerpt of up to 300 characters and the path to its SKILL.md instructions. The excerpt helps the agent choose a skill for a plain-language task; it is a selection hint, not an instruction to execute. Supporting files are available alongside the instructions.

For a skill marked disable-model-invocation, the list tells the agent to wait until the task asks for that skill by name. This is guidance, not an access control. Keep the equipment focused and name the procedure when it matters; availability alone does not prove that the result followed it.

Resolve missing or changed skills

Deleting a skill unequips it from every agent that carried it, and the audit log records which ones. If a required skill is no longer shared with the run's scope, staging fails and names the unavailable skill; the run is not retried automatically, because nothing about a retry changes that. In the agent's dialog the skill is listed as unavailable so you can untick it — every other setting of the agent still saves. Restore the intended access or remove the obsolete equipment before retrying.

Changes to a shared bundle affect later staging for its users. Review replacements and test an agent with a known input after a substantial change. Do not assume a repository's similarly named skill overrides the equipped bundle.

Choose skills or agent instructions

Use the skill library guide to create, import, edit, and share a bundle.