Skills Tutorial

Skills add task-specific rules or working styles to the AI. Use them after basic chat already works.

When to use a skill

• you want a type of task to follow a fixed format
• you want the AI to load extra instructions for a specific scenario
• you want to reuse a working method instead of prompting from scratch every time

Basic flow

1. Complete a normal conversation first.
2. Install or enable one skill.
3. Select it for the relevant task.
4. Compare the output before and after enabling it.

Skill sources

• Project skills: <project>/.agents/skills/
• NextClaw skills: <workspace>/skills/
• Global Agent Skills: ~/.agents/skills/
• Built-in skills: packaged with NextClaw

The skill picker groups these sources separately. A session bound to a project also loads that project's AGENTS.md as project instructions.

Note

Skills are not required for first setup.
Confirm models and sessions work before adding skills.

Related docs

• Chat & Sessions
• Command Index