Skills

A skill is a reusable, named piece of know-how for your AI coding agents: a SKILL.md with instructions, plus optional bundle files such as templates, scripts or reference notes. Skills live in an agent setup and are exported to Claude Code, Codex and Cursor together with its agents, MCP servers and AGENTS.md content.

The Skills tab

Open your agent setup in the web app and go to its Skills tab. It lists every skill in the setup. Use the Filter skills field to find a skill by name, and the source filter to narrow the list to All, Created here or Imported skills. Each option shows how many skills it matches.

Add skill is a split button. Its menu offers:

Write a new skill — start an empty skill and write it yourself.
Import skills — from presets, skills.sh or a Git URL (see Importing skills below).

Note

Add skill is only shown to project editors and owners, and not on the shared default setup, which can't be edited — clone it first, see Agent Setups. Importing also requires a setup that belongs to your project. On any other setup that you can edit, Import skills is shown in the menu but disabled, and the main button reads Write a new skill instead.

Skills that come from the shared catalog are read-only. Open one in the skill editor and choose Customize to edit files to create an editable copy of it for your project.

Importing skills

Import skills opens a page with three steps:

1 · Source — choose where the skills come from:
- Presets — curated presets of ready-made skills.
- skills.sh — search the public skills.sh skills directory.
- Git URL — enter a Repository or index URL: a GitHub or GitLab repository, optionally followed by /tree/<ref>/<path> to point at a branch, tag or folder, or an https:// skills index. Only https:// URLs are accepted.
2 · Find — browse or search the skills available from that source.
3 · Choose skills — select the skills to import and import them together.

Name conflicts

If a skill you choose has the same name as one in your setup, Athenode tells you that "A skill with this name is already in the setup". Choose Replace existing skill to overwrite it with the imported one, or Keep existing (skip) to leave your skill as it is and skip the import.

MCP servers for imported skills

Skills often rely on particular MCP servers. After an import, the MCP servers for the imported skills panel lists the servers the skills require or suggest, each with a status such as Already in setup, Found in catalog or Not in catalog. You can add the missing servers from the panel straight away.

The setup page also shows a Missing MCP servers notice for servers that the setup's skills require but that the setup doesn't have yet. Use Add to add a server or Dismiss to hide it; you can show dismissed servers again later. See MCP servers for details.

Editing a skill

Open a skill to edit it in the skill editor.

Instructions: you edit the body of SKILL.md without its frontmatter. Each save creates a new version of the skill.
Skill settings: these are the frontmatter fields that Athenode writes into each target's SKILL.md when it exports the setup. See the CLI page for how exports work.
Bundle files: add, rename and remove the skill's other files in a file tree. There are limits on the size of each file, on the total size of the bundle and on the number of files; the editor shows how much of each limit the skill currently uses.

Updating imported skills

Imported skills remember where they came from. The skill editor's source card shows the Repository, Ref, Path, Pinned revision and when the skill was Imported.

Check for updates checks all imported skills in the setup at once; Check checks a single skill in the list.
When an update is available, View changes opens a diff of the skill in either Unified or Side by side view. Choose Apply update to take the new version.
The update banner also offers Apply all, which updates every skill with a pending update after you confirm.

Warning

Applying an update, and especially Apply all, overwrites any local edits you've made to those skills. Check View changes first if you've customised an imported skill.

A skill you've edited since importing it shows a warning icon in the list, with the tooltip Locally modified, and a Locally modified label in the skill editor.

What's next

Agents — the subagents your skills delegate work to
MCP servers — the tools your skills rely on
Built-in skills — the skills that ship with the Athenode setup
CLI — how skills are exported to Claude Code, Codex and Cursor