A Skill is a tested playbook your agents load at runtime — a plain SKILL.md file with the procedure, the safety rules, and the triggers that tell an agent when to reach for it. Author it once, enable it anywhere.
You never invoke a skill by hand. The agent reads your request, matches it against every enabled skill's trigger phrases, and loads the winning playbook. Pick a task:
When the procedure changes you update one file. Every agent that has it enabled picks up the change on its next run.
Update the playbook in one file. Every agent that has it enabled learns it on the next run — no copy-paste, no version drift, no missed instruction block.
— skills · catalog broadcast · single source of truthEverything a skill is lives in one Markdown file: YAML frontmatter on top, the playbook below. Click a zone to see what it does.
Every skill on the Skills page belongs to one of five groups — each marked in the list with its own accent ribbon. The group determines where the skill came from and what you can do with it.
`web-task`, `agent-browser`, and the core integration set. `agent-browser` is always enabled and cannot be toggled off.
Skills you write yourself — a SKILL.md in your workspace. Full ownership, full control.
Pulled from a shared workspace folder. Visible to your whole organization, never published publicly.
Community and curated skills. Automatic updates when new versions are approved.
Deployed by zip upload to a paired VPS. Visible in VPS/web mode, where the page reads "VPS Skills".
Open Skills in the sidebar. Everything you need to discover, manage, and author skills lives here.
Bundled skills ship with Actionist and are ready to use immediately. Once you find a skill, the enablement flow is the same for every group.
{`name: web-task
description: Browser automation and web search.
version: 2.1.0
triggers:
- when asked to open a URL or browse a website
- when the user needs a web search`}
The Skill Creator turns a plain-language description into a correctly structured SKILL.md in one conversation. Or author the file yourself if you want full control from the start.
A conversational AI inside Actionist writes your skill's frontmatter, trigger list, and playbook body from a plain-language description. No YAML knowledge required. Here's a whole creation, start to finish:
Create a `SKILL.md` file inside any registered folder. Actionist indexes it on the next refresh. The file is plain Markdown with a YAML frontmatter block at the top.
The anatomy explorer above shows where each field lives — here is the full detail for each one.
Skills that need API keys declare slots in frontmatter. You bind those slots to vault entries once, and every run resolves them silently:
The Actionist marketplace hosts community and curated skills. Install once, receive automatic updates when new versions are approved, and uninstall cleanly when you are done.
Custom skills you have tested and refined can be submitted to the Actionist marketplace for review. Once published, other users can install and benefit from your work.
Click Create skill on the Skills page. Describe the task in plain language. Actionist writes the playbook — you enable it on every agent that needs it.
Skills encode tested procedures, not guesses.
Vault-backed credentials · Per-agent scoping · Marketplace reviews.