Skills and the catalogue
The skills agents load, the customisations you can add, and the teams, roles and templates your organisation or team shares.
Agents in AI Workbench can load skills: folders of instructions in the open Agent Skills (SKILL.md) format that teach an agent how to do one kind of work. Some come built in, your organisation or team can publish more, and you can write your own. Your organisation's or team's catalogue also brings shared teams, roles, prompts and document templates.
Built-in skills
AI Workbench ships with engineering skills every agent can load: debugging, test-driven work, codebase design and prototyping (adapted from Matt Pocock's skills, MIT licence), and a memory skill that teaches agents to use the workbench's memory. They are kept current by the app.
See which skills agents get
Open Settings → Skills (under Customisations). The Shared skills group lists every skill an agent started here is told about, grouped by where it comes from:
| Group | Comes from |
|---|---|
| Built in | Shipped with the app and kept current by it. |
| Your organisation | Published by your organisation for every project. |
| Your team | Published on your team's hub. |
| This machine | Kept on this machine for your own projects. |
Agents load a skill when a task calls for it. Nothing is written into your repository. A skill with the same name as a built-in one is "Used instead of the built-in skill of the same name."
A team member's chosen skills limit what that member sees.
Your own customisations
The Customisations group in Settings has a page for each kind of thing you can add:
| Page | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Agents | Agent definitions (New agent). |
| Skills | Skills (New skill). |
| Prompts | Reusable prompts (New prompt). |
| Instructions | Standing instructions for agents (New instructions). |
| Hooks | Hooks that run on agent events (New hook). |
| Tool servers | The MCP servers agents use, and how each is governed (Add a server). |
| Plugins | Plugins (Add plugin). |
| Tools | The tools agents can call. |
Two switches decide what every agent in a repository gets: Share these servers with every agent and Brief every agent on this repository's customisations.
Share a skill with your team
On a team hub, the hub's owner can share a repository's skill with the whole team: on its row in Settings → Skills, choose Publish to the team. Update on the team and Withdraw from the team follow. See Team hub.
Your organisation's catalogue
When you are signed in to an organisation, it can publish a catalogue of skills, roles, prompts, teams, tool servers and document templates. The workbench brings it down when you sign in and keeps it current; there is nothing to install. Catalogue items appear where you use them:
- Teams: Your organisation's teams in the Teams view. "Its members' roles and skills come from the catalogue, and every project it is given to loads it."
- Team wizard: start a team from one of the organisation's, under From your organisation; roles are grouped the same way.
- Skills: under Your organisation in Shared skills.
- Library templates: under the organisation's name, beside From your team and Built in.
Settings → Organisation shows the revision of the policy and templates your repositories applied.
A team hub shares the same kinds of things with its members: skills, prompts, roles and Library templates.