Skills
Short playbooks that teach the agent how your team does a particular job, read when they are relevant.
A skill is a short guide that teaches the agent how your team does something: how you write release notes, how you size work, what your readiness review covers.
Each one has a name, a line describing when it should be used, and a body. The agent only sees that one line until it decides the skill is relevant, then it opens it. So a skill can be as long as it needs to be without slowing down every conversation.
Using one
Type / in the message box and pick a skill to apply it deliberately. Otherwise the agent reaches
for one on its own when the situation matches its description.
That description is the whole interface. "Whenever drafting release notes or launch announcements" gets opened at the right moment; "notes" does not.
Three tiers
Open a skill's Comments panel to discuss its wording or suggest an edit. Readers can participate; accepting the edit follows the source's maintenance permission in the table below. See Comments and suggested edits for review threads and mentions.
| Tier | Who it is for | Who can write it |
|---|---|---|
| Built in | Ships with Plansmith, read-only. | Nobody, they are ours. |
| Company | Everyone in the workspace. | Owners. |
| This project | Only that project. | Members and owners. |
What ships built in
Plan structure
Where new work belongs: Specs here, a sub-plan, or beside this plan.
Spec writer
How a spec gets written here: what to ask first, and the coverage walk before it is ready.
Epic writer
How the plan's epic gets written, confirmed and corrected.
Readiness review
Scores how build-ready one spec is; findings land in a file.
Acceptance review
Checks what was built against one spec, criterion by criterion; the report lands in a file.
Prototype builder
Builds a clickable prototype of the plan.
Deep research
Sends parallel research agents at a question; the report lands in Context.
Adversarial review
Argues the other side of one spec before you commit to it; findings land in its review file.
Push to your issue tracker
Sends the plan to your issue tracker, and stops without writing if a teammate changed one of the issues first.
Resolve push conflicts
Works through what your team changed, one item at a time, so a stopped push can go.
Open questions
Raises a question only your team can answer onto the spec, records the answer with who gave it, and retires a question that turned out not to apply.
Spec format and Epic format are edited under Formats, not here. They appear in this list because that is how the agent reaches them, and if your team customizes either one, the agent reads your version instead of ours.
Extending a built-in skill
A company or project skill can extend a built-in one instead of replacing it: it says which skill it extends, adds your rules at the points that skill opens up, and Plansmith delivers both together. Five skills can be extended: Readiness review, Acceptance review, Prototype builder, Spec writer and Epic writer.
Extending a skill is the whole story: the field, the extension points, a worked example, what an extension may and may not do, and what to check when yours is not firing.
Looking for your spec or epic format? A format is not a skill. It decides the sections each spec and each epic is written in, it lives in Settings → Formats, and the two writer skills read it every time. See Formats.
The agent never writes a skill
At any tier. It can propose an instruction and it can adjust a project format when you ask it to in conversation, but a skill is always written by a person.
That is deliberate: skills are procedures the agent then follows, so a skill it could write itself would be a loop with nobody in it.
Write one under Settings → Skills.
Building a repository skill for a coding agent instead? Build a skill around a plan shows how to pull structured plan data, keep local work separate, check coverage, run a fresh review and publish the result through the CLI.