Manage Skills

Skills provide reusable, multi-step workflows and capabilities for your coding agents. Aikito stores skills canonically in your workspace and connects them to your code repositories.

The bundled aikito and durable-memory skills are system-managed snapshots of the installed Aikito package. aikito status, aikito doctor, and aikito show skill report divergent snapshots; workspace initialization and global synchronization back up and refresh them. Do not customize these two directories in place. Put custom workflows in separately named skills and custom policy in global or project instructions.

Create or import a skill

Ask your agent to create a new workflow skill:

Create an Aikito skill named review-checklist for project example's review workflow. Inspect existing skills first, write the workflow, synchronize it, and verify the project receives it.

To manually scaffold a new skill skeleton:

aikito add skill review-checklist --project example
aikito edit skill review-checklist

This creates <workspace>/skills/review-checklist/SKILL.md and attaches it to project example.

Import an existing external skill

To import an existing external skill directory or file into Aikito and attach it to one or more projects in a single step:

aikito add skill review-checklist --from /path/to/existing-skill --project example-a,example-b --sync

The skill source is imported into <workspace>/skills/review-checklist/; its project selection is registered in each specified project's agent.toml.

To refresh that canonical snapshot after the external directory changes, repeat the import with --force:

aikito add skill review-checklist --from /path/to/existing-skill --force \
  --project example-a,example-b --sync

The replacement is a complete snapshot: files removed from the external source are removed from the canonical skill too. Existing project registrations are preserved, and newly requested projects are attached. --force is accepted only with --from, preventing accidental overwrites.

Attach an existing skill to projects

To attach a canonical skill that already exists in <workspace>/skills/ to additional projects, run add skill with the target projects:

aikito add skill review-checklist --project example-b --sync

Alternatively, you can manually add the skill name to the skills array in projects/example/agent.toml:

skills = ["durable-memory", "review-checklist"]

To enable a skill across all projects by default, configure it in <workspace>/skills.toml and synchronize globally:

aikito sync global

Inspect and verify

Preview, synchronize, and inspect the attached skill:

aikito sync project example --dry-run
aikito sync project example
aikito show project example
aikito show skill review-checklist

Confirm the selected skill has no missing-resource or conflict finding and its content matches your workflow.

Unregister or remove a skill

To unregister a skill from one or more projects while keeping its canonical directory in <workspace>/skills/:

aikito rm skill review-checklist --project example-b --sync

To remove a skill globally (unregisters from skills.toml and deletes <workspace>/skills/<name>):

aikito rm skill review-checklist --sync

If the skill is still registered in any project, global removal is blocked by default to prevent dangling references. To unregister it from all referencing projects and delete it globally in one command, use --force:

aikito rm skill review-checklist --force --sync

For Git-tracked skill snapshots, see project skill sync modes. Next, Manage Instructions or keep decisions in memory.