Skills standard

How skills are stored, discovered, enabled, and used in FamilyCo.

A skill is a packaged capability an agent can use — a reusable prompt, a structured output, or a procedure. FamilyCo discovers skills from disk and makes them switchable per company.

Canonical path

{CODEBASE}/skills/{SKILL_NAME}/SKILL.md

Each skill lives in its own directory. The directory name must match the skill slug (lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens only).

Required rules

• Every skill lives in its own directory.
• SKILL.md is mandatory.
• Supporting files may sit beside SKILL.md.
• Skills are scanned on app start and on manual rescan.

Frontmatter

Required

• name — must equal the directory slug.
• description — explain what the skill does and when to use it.

Optional

• license
• compatibility — note FamilyCo runtime constraints if relevant.
• metadata — may include owner, version, tags, allowedModules.

Recommended folder structure

skills/
└─ finance-analyst/
   ├─ SKILL.md
   ├─ examples.md
   ├─ references.md
   └─ templates/

Keep SKILL.md concise so discovery stays cheap. Put long examples and references in side files; the runtime loads them only when a task truly needs them.

Example SKILL.md

---
name: finance-analyst
description: Analyze budget usage, identify spend anomalies, and produce concise reports for FamilyCo budget reviews.
compatibility: FamilyCo server runtime, markdown output, no browser needed.
metadata:
  owner: familyco
  version: 1.0.0
  tags: [budget, finance, reporting]
---

# When to use
Use when an agent needs to analyze token or cost data.

# Inputs
- budget usage rows
- time window
- grouping level

# Outputs
- summary
- anomalies
- recommendations

Enable / disable behavior

• Disabled skills remain discoverable in the UI but cannot be selected for new runs.
• Existing completed runs still reference disabled skills historically.
• If a run requests a disabled skill, the runtime creates an Inbox warning instead of silently substituting.

See the Skills module for the UI flows.