Skills

A skill is a folder of reusable instructions gaia pulls into context when it’s relevant — a SKILL.md file (plus any helper files) under your skills directory. Think of it as a playbook you teach gaia once: “how to draft my weekly report”, “how we deploy”, “my writing style”.

How gaia uses them

The root agent carries an on-demand skill toolset: skills aren’t all loaded into the prompt up front (that would burn tokens). Instead gaia sees the available skills’ names/descriptions and pulls a skill’s full text into context only when a task calls for it — progressive disclosure. Install a skill and it’s usable immediately, no restart.

Author + manage

gaia skill list              # installed skills
gaia skill show <id>         # print a skill's SKILL.md
gaia skill new <id>          # scaffold a new SKILL.md folder to edit
gaia skill install <path>    # add a skill folder
gaia skill remove <id>

A skill is just <skills_dir>/<id>/SKILL.md — author it in any editor. In chat, /skill lists what’s available. Full flags: Reference → CLI.

Code map

Concern	Module
Skill loading, SKILL.md parsing, on-demand toolset	src/gaia/skills.py
gaia skill CLI	src/gaia/cli/skill.py

Skills can also grow on their own — gaia mines its usage and proposes new ones; see Self-improvement.