Skills System

⚠️ Experimental — Squad is alpha software. APIs, commands, and behavior may change between releases.

Try this to see what your team learned:

Show me what skills this team has learned

Try this to list all accumulated knowledge:

List all skills

Try this to document a reusable pattern:

Create a skill for our deployment process

Agents learn from real work and write skill files — reusable patterns, conventions, and techniques. Skills compound over time, making your team smarter with each project.

Where Skills Live

.squad/skills/{skill-name}/SKILL.md

Each skill is a directory containing a SKILL.md file. Skills are team-wide knowledge — not tied to individual agents. All agents can read and use any skill.

Portable across projects: Skills export and import with your team. When you move a trained team to a new repo, all their earned knowledge comes with them.

Types of Skills

Starter skills

Bundled when you initialize Squad. Prefixed with squad- (e.g., squad-conventions). These encode baseline patterns for working with Squad.

Earned skills

Written by agents from real work on your project. When an agent discovers a reusable pattern — a deployment strategy, a testing technique, an API integration approach — it writes a skill file.

Confidence Lifecycle

Earned skills have a confidence level that reflects how battle-tested they are:

Confidence only goes up, never down. A skill that reaches high stays there.

How Skills Are Used

1. Before working, agents read skill files relevant to the task at hand
2. Skill-aware routing — the coordinator checks available skills when deciding which agent to spawn. An agent with a relevant earned skill may be preferred over one without.
3. After working, agents may write new skills or update existing ones based on what they learned

Example

After successfully setting up a CI pipeline, an agent might create:

.squad/skills/ci-github-actions/SKILL.md

# CI with GitHub Actions

**Confidence:** medium

## Pattern
- Use `actions/checkout@v4` for repo access
- Cache node_modules with `actions/cache@v4` using hash of package-lock.json
- Run lint, test, and build as separate jobs for parallel execution
- Use `concurrency` groups to cancel superseded runs

## Learned from
- Initial CI setup (session 3)
- Pipeline optimization after slow builds (session 7)

Tips

• Skills compound over time. A mature project has skills covering testing patterns, deployment procedures, API conventions, and more.
• Starter skills (squad-*) are overwritten on upgrade. Earned skills are never touched.
• Skills are shared across the whole team — any agent can read any skill. They’re stored in a flat .squad/skills/ directory, not per-agent files.
• You can manually edit skill files if you want to seed knowledge (e.g., paste your team’s existing conventions into a SKILL.md).
• Skills survive export/import — your team’s accumulated knowledge is fully portable across projects.

Sample Prompts

list all skills

Shows all skill files in .squad/skills/ with confidence levels for earned skills.

what's the confidence level for the CI skill?

Checks how battle-tested a specific earned skill is.

create a skill for our deployment process

Manually creates a new skill file and guides you through documenting the pattern.

which skills have low confidence?

Finds recently-created skills that haven’t been validated across multiple contexts yet.

bump the testing skill to high confidence

Manually increases the confidence level after successful repeated use.