Skills

Skills are on-demand instructions that teach Topchester a reusable workflow for one kind of task.

They are different from project instructions and generated knowledge:

• AGENTS.md controls project behavior all the time.
• skills/*/SKILL.md provides reusable workflows that activate only when selected or mentioned.
• topchester-kb/ and .agents/topchester-kb-cache/ are generated project knowledge, not skill files.

Topchester ships a built-in topchester skill for product help and a focused topchester-config skill for configuration work. Workspace and user skills can still shadow built-ins with the same name.

The system prompt tells the agent to load the topchester skill for questions about Topchester itself. The skill and its compact linked references ship with the installed package, so product help works in repositories that have no project KB. Explicit /skill topchester and @topchester activation remain available.

Activate skills

Use the TUI:

/skills
/skills list
/skills inspect code-review
/skill code-review review this diff

You can also mention active skills in normal prompts:

@code-review review this diff

Unknown mentions stay normal text. Multiple skill mentions are applied in mention order.

Skills may list files under references, templates, scripts, or assets. The agent can read a named linked file with its read-only skill_read tool after inspecting or activating the skill. Reads stay inside the selected linked-file group and are capped at 64 KiB.