Teach it once, not once per machine

Every team that runs coding agents seriously arrives at the same problem from a different direction. You explain how your deploy works. It goes well. Then you explain it again tomorrow, in another session, on another machine, and slightly differently - because you are typing it from memory and you are in a hurry.

The usual fix is a file. Instructions in the repository, or a folder copied onto each machine by an installer. That works right up until you need to change a word, at which point you are doing a release, and until something you withdrew keeps working from a copy nobody remembered.

What a skill is

A skill is a folder of instructions that tells an agent how to do one kind of job, held on your Gateway rather than copied onto each machine. A directory with a SKILL.md file at its root, plus whatever else it needs: reference notes, scripts, images, data files, subdirectories. It can carry real programs, not only prose - a file can be marked executable so a script inside a skill actually runs.

That shape is not ours. It is the Agent Skills open standard, and every agent DevThrottle has a first-class driver for reads that same directory, byte for byte. Which produces the single most useful fact about skills: there is no per-agent format. One skill works across all eight of the first-class agents without being converted, adapted, or kept in two versions that drift. The only thing that differs is which folder the directory has to appear in, and that is handled for you.

A skill is not a workflow

They sit on the same shelf and they answer different questions. A workflow governs how a whole job is run and who staffs it. A skill is one capability an agent picks up in the middle of a job - how to deploy this service, how to talk to that tool, the words this team uses for things.

The briefing is an index, not the library

Two separate things happen when a session starts, and they are kept apart deliberately.

• The session is told what exists. Its briefing carries one line per skill - the name and what it does - and the instruction to fetch a skill in full only when about to use it. That index is bounded: at most forty skills are listed, and past that the block says how many more there are and which command lists them all.
• The instructions are put where the agent looks. The skills you have switched on are downloaded and stored on the machine, and written into the place that agent reads when a session starts. So nothing about the network can delay a session starting.

The effect is that a session knows the fleet can do forty things while carrying the text of none of them, and reads the one it needs at the moment it decides it needs it.

Publishing is the deployment

Anyone can author a skill, and so can any agent. It is written as a draft, which no agent sees and no briefing names. Publishing makes it the live version at once - nothing to deploy, nothing to install, nothing to restart on any machine.

There is one delay and it is at the edge: each connected Director re-reads the catalog about once a minute, so a session started in the first moments after a publish can still be briefed with the previous catalog. Reading the library directly from the command line is never behind, because that asks the Gateway live.

Two people editing the same skill do not overwrite each other. An edit carries the hash of the version it was made against, and a write that is no longer current is refused rather than quietly losing the other author's work.

Switching one off

The catalog page in the Cockpit holds the two controls that matter. The switch leaves a skill out of every briefing and refuses its fetch, with nothing deleted and the flip instant both ways - which is what you want at the moment you realise an instruction is wrong. Clone copies a skill into one of your own, which is how you customise a built-in without forking it.

One honest exception: DevThrottle's ninth driver points at any command line of your own, and a raw command line has no skills mechanism - no folder it reads, no convention for finding one. There is nowhere to put a skill for such a session, so none is put there. The library is still on the machine and still readable from the command line.

The catalog, the authoring commands and the full briefing rules: skills. For the other list on that shelf, see workflows.