Skills

Skills are domain knowledge plugins that get injected into the agent's system prompt. CLI-JAW ships with 25 default active skills and 93 reference skills (118 total) covering development, cloud platforms, documentation, and more.

How Skills Work

Each skill is a directory containing a SKILL.md file. Active skills are loaded into the system prompt automatically. Reference skills are listed as available but not injected unless activated.

~/.cli-jaw/skills/
├── dev/SKILL.md           # Active: common development rules
├── dev-frontend/SKILL.md  # Active: frontend-specific guidance
├── browser/SKILL.md       # Active: browser automation
└── ...

~/.cli-jaw/skills_ref/
├── registry.json          # Reference skill catalog
├── cloudflare/SKILL.md    # Available on demand
├── docker/SKILL.md
└── ...

Skill Categories

CLI Commands

# List all skills
jaw skill list

# Install a skill
jaw skill install cloudflare

# Remove a skill
jaw skill remove cloudflare

# Get skill info
jaw skill info dev-frontend

# Reset skills to defaults
jaw skill reset

Slash Commands

SKILL.md Format

A skill file is a markdown document that follows a specific structure:

# Skill Name

Brief description of what this skill provides.

## When to Use

Trigger conditions for when the agent should activate this skill.

## Rules

1. Specific rules the agent must follow.
2. Another rule.

## Examples

```bash
# Example command or code
```

Custom Skill Authoring

You can create custom skills by adding a directory to ~/.cli-jaw/skills/:

mkdir -p ~/.cli-jaw/skills/my-custom-skill
cat > ~/.cli-jaw/skills/my-custom-skill/SKILL.md << 'EOF'
# My Custom Skill

Custom domain knowledge for my specific workflow.

## Rules

1. Always prefer TypeScript over JavaScript.
2. Use pnpm instead of npm.
EOF

The skill will be automatically loaded into the system prompt on the next agent run.

Prompt Injection

Skills are injected into the system prompt by getSystemPrompt() in src/prompt/builder.ts. The rendering logic:

• If both active and reference skills exist: renders active skills inline + available skill list + discovery hint
• If only active skills exist: renders them without the available list
• If only reference skills exist: renders the available list + discovery hint

Employee Skills

Employee prompts (getEmployeePromptV2()) include role-specific and phase-specific skills automatically. For example, a "Frontend" employee gets dev-frontend, and during the Check phase, employees get dev-testing.