Skills

Skills are reusable instruction packages that teach Orion's assistant how to follow your team's workflows. Each skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file discovered from your Jupyter workspace.

What skills do

• Add domain rules, checklists, and templates to the assistant
• Appear as /skill-name slash commands in chat
• Can auto-load when the model decides they match your request (unless disabled)

Orion ships built-in skills (for example orion-ui, create-app, create-subagent, chat-history). Workspace skills with the same name override the built-in copy.

For a full guide to each built-in skill and the Orion features they connect to, see Built-in skills.

Where to put skills

Location	Purpose
.agents/skills/<name>/SKILL.md	Default — shared with other agent tooling
.orion/skills/<name>/SKILL.md	Orion-only override of the same skill name

Precedence (lowest to highest): user .agents → user .orion → project .agents → project .orion.

Prefer .agents/skills for new skills. Use .orion/skills only when you need Orion-specific behavior for a skill that already exists under .agents.

Example layout:

.agents/skills/
└── quarterly-report/
    ├── SKILL.md
    └── reference.md

SKILL.md format

Each skill needs YAML frontmatter:

---
name: quarterly-report
description: Standardizes quarterly CSV ingestion and validation. Use when importing spreadsheets or validating columns before analysis.
---

# Quarterly report

## Steps
1. ...

• name: lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens only (matches /quarterly-report)
• description: third person; what the skill does and when to use it
• disable-model-invocation (optional): when true, the skill only loads via /name, not automatically

Create a skill

1. Create .agents/skills/<name>/SKILL.md in your workspace.
2. Write frontmatter and instructions.
3. If the skill does not appear immediately, reconnect the Jupyter kernel or reload Orion.

Ask the assistant to "create a skill for …" and it can scaffold the file for you.

Hidden folders and Jupyter

Jupyter may hide dot-directories by default, so skills under .agents or .orion might not load until you enable hidden folders. See Jupyter hidden folders and skills.

Related

• Built-in skills — extended guides for shipped skills
• Slash commands
• Sub-agents

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Last updated May 2026.