Skills

Skills are composable instruction sets that teach agents new capabilities. A skill is a directory with a SKILL.md file that gets injected into the agent's system prompt.

How skills work

When building context for each agent loop iteration, the context builder loads all active skills and injects their content into the system prompt. This gives the agent domain-specific instructions, reference data, and behavioral guidelines without modifying the base system prompt.

skills/
  web-research/
    SKILL.md          ← injected into context
  customer-support/
    SKILL.md
    FAQ.md            ← reference data the skill can use

Built-in skills

ClaudePaw ships a registry of built-in skills covering common use cases: web research, writing, data analysis, customer support, and more. Browse and activate them from the dashboard.

Custom skills

Write your own SKILL.md to teach agents anything. Upload via the dashboard or API. Skills are stored in R2 per organization.

Writing a good SKILL.md

• Start with a clear purpose statement
• Define specific behaviors and constraints
• Include examples of expected input/output
• Reference any companion data files
• Keep it focused — one skill per capability

Skill management

Skills are toggled per agent. An agent might have “web-research” and “customer-support” active while another has “writing” and “data-analysis”. This keeps context windows focused and token costs down.