Skills

A skill is a reusable chunk of agent instructions that can be assigned to many agents. Where an agent's main instructions describe who the agent is, a skill describes what it knows how to do. Defining a skill once and assigning it to several agents keeps capabilities consistent and easy to update.

Skills are workspace-scoped — every agent in the same workspace can be assigned the same skill, and editing the skill propagates to all of them on the next task.

Skill Usage Activity

The Skills list shows each workspace Skill's recorded activity for the last seven calendar days. The compact activity bars and total are populated from completed or finally failed agent tasks; built-in Skills remain at zero because they are not workspace usage records. The detail page provides a 30-day view, and the Usage dashboard can show workspace totals and a ranked Skill breakdown for the selected date range. Activity is recorded from the point this feature is enabled; earlier all-time invocation values are not backfilled.

What a Skill Contains

Skills do not have their own runtime or status. They are pure instruction snippets — the agent provides the runtime, the skill provides the knowledge.

Create a Skill

1. Open Skills in the sidebar
2. Click New skill
3. Enter a name and complete the SKILL.md content, keeping the frontmatter name consistent with the form name
4. Click Create
5. Optionally manage supporting files from the skill detail page

The manual form requires SKILL.md frontmatter with a non-empty name that exactly matches the form name.

Keep skills focused on a single capability. A skill that tries to do five things tends to drift; five small skills you compose per agent give you sharper control.

Supporting Files

A skill can bundle extra files that are written to the agent's working directory at task start. This is useful for:

• Reference documents the agent should read before acting
• Partial prompt templates
• Scripts or config files the agent invokes via tools

Each file has a path (relative to the working directory) and content. Manage files from the skill detail page.

You can also import skills from a local directory (containing SKILL.md and extra files) or export workspace skills for version control:

# Import a skill from a local directory into the workspace
mopheus skill import --path ./my-skill

# Export skills to local files
mopheus skill export --all --output-dir ./skills

Example: Audit MySQL Slow Queries

You are a MySQL performance expert specialising in diagnosing bottlenecks through the slow query log.

When asked to analyse slow queries:
1. First check `show variables like 'slow_query%'` to confirm logging is enabled and locate the log path
2. Use `mysqldumpslow` or read the slow query log directly, extracting the Top 10 by Query_time
3. For each slow query, run `EXPLAIN` and watch for full table scans (`type = ALL`)
4. Check whether relevant tables have suitable indexes; if not, propose specific `CREATE INDEX` statements
5. Return results as a Markdown table with columns: SQL summary, execution time, rows scanned, issue type, optimisation suggestion

Diagnostic principles:
- Prioritise queries that scan many rows but return few (typical missing-index scenario)
- For slow queries with `ORDER BY ... LIMIT`, check whether `filesort` is used
- When JOIN queries are slow, ensure both sides of the join condition are indexed

Assign Skills to an Agent

From the agent's settings, open the Skills field and pick one or more skills. The picker shows every skill in the workspace plus your private skills.

When the agent picks up a task, the active skills' instructions are appended to its main instructions in the order they are listed. Reorder skills to change their precedence — earlier skills generally dominate when guidance conflicts.

Removing a skill from an agent takes effect on the next task; in-flight tasks finish with the skill set they were dispatched with.

Built-in Skills

The Skills page has two tabs: Workspace and Built-in.

Built-in skills are provided by the platform and are read-only — you cannot edit or delete them. They appear in the Built-in tab and are automatically available to all agents at task runtime (unless overridden by a workspace skill of the same name). Built-in skills cover common operational and development capabilities that the platform ships out of the box.

• using-codegraph: Provides code intelligence and AST knowledge graph CLI capabilities (codegraph explore, callers, callees, impact, affected, sync) for coding agents, backed by Daemon sidecar snapshot caching and git exclude integration for rapid code exploration and blast radius analysis.

Manage the Skill Library

The Skills page lists every skill in the workspace. Use the label filter to narrow the list to skills that have all selected labels. You can edit a skill's labels directly from its list row or from the detail sidebar.

Skill and ticket labels are separate resource types. Use the skill target type when listing or resolving skill labels; a label cannot be deleted while it is still attached to an object of its resource type.

From the row's overflow menu you can:

• Edit — change the instructions; the new version is used by every agent on the next task
• Duplicate — clone the skill as a starting point for a variant
• Delete — permanently remove the skill. Every agent that had it assigned will have it removed automatically.

Command Line Reference

# List workspace skills
mopheus skill list
# Filter by keyword and paginate
mopheus skill list --search "audit" --page 2 --per-page 25

# Get skill details
mopheus skill get <id>

# Manage skill labels by name or UUID
mopheus skill label list <skill-id>
mopheus skill label add <skill-id> "ops"
mopheus skill label remove <skill-id> "ops"

# Keep skill and ticket label lists separate
mopheus label list --target-type skill
mopheus label list --target-type ticket

# Export/import workspace configuration, including skill labels
mopheus workspace export ./workspace-bundle
mopheus workspace import ./workspace-bundle

# Create a skill
mopheus skill create --name "Audit Slow Queries" --content "..."

# Update a skill
mopheus skill update <id> --content "..."

# Delete a skill
mopheus skill delete <id>

# Import a skill from a URL or local directory
mopheus skill import --url https://example.com/skill.md
mopheus skill import --path ./local-skill-dir

# Export skills to local files
mopheus skill export <id> --output-dir ./skills

# Manage skill files
mopheus skill files list <skill-id>
mopheus skill files upsert <skill-id> --path "config.json" --content '{"key":"val"}'
mopheus skill files delete <skill-id> <file-id>