Skills

Saved instructions the NodeTool agent loads for a kind of work: your own skills, the built-in ones, the SKILL.md format, and the slash command.

A skill is a saved set of instructions for one kind of work. It has a name, a one-line description of when it applies, and a Markdown body. The agent reads the name and description on every turn. It reads the body only when it needs it, or when you name the skill with / in chat.

Quick Access: Click + in the workspace tab bar and choose New skill, or open the Skills panel from the left panel’s More menu. In chat, type / to pick a skill.

Two kinds of skill

  User skill System skill
Who wrote it You, or the agent for you NodeTool ships it
Where it lives Your database A SKILL.md file in the install
Editable Yes No. It opens read-only
Shown in the panel as A skill with a sparkle icon A skill with a lock icon and the label Built in
Available to the agent Yes Yes, on every install

System skills cannot be renamed, edited, or deleted from the app or by the agent. Their names are reserved: you cannot create a skill with the name of a system skill. A user skill that already had such a name before the system skill shipped keeps working and wins over the system one.

Create and edit a skill

  1. Click + in the workspace tab bar and choose New skill. A new skill opens in a tab with a generated name such as skill-m3x9k2, a placeholder description, and a short starter body. The + button at the top of the Skills panel does the same.
  2. Set the Name. Use lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens, up to 64 characters. The name cannot contain anthropic or claude.
  3. Set the Description. Write it as when to use the skill, for example “Use when writing release notes from a changelog.” It is the only part the agent always sees. It can be up to 1024 characters and cannot contain markup such as <tag>.
  4. Write the instructions in the Markdown editor below the two fields.

The editor saves on its own about three-quarters of a second after you stop typing. Save saves immediately, and a dot beside it shows unsaved changes. The tab title follows the skill name.

In the Skills panel, right-click a skill for Rename and Delete, and for Duplicate, which creates a copy named <name>-copy. Built-in skills open as a read-only view and have no rename or delete action.

You can also ask the agent to do this in chat, for example “Save these steps as a skill called weekly-report.” See How the agent finds and loads skills below.

What makes a good skill

  • Write the description as a trigger. “Use when the user asks for a changelog summary” lets the agent decide from one line whether to load the skill.
  • Keep one skill to one kind of work. Several narrow skills load faster and conflict less than one large one.
  • Put the steps, defaults, and checks in the body. The agent follows the body as instructions for the turn.

The SKILL.md format

System skills are files. Each lives in its own directory, packages/system-skills/<name>/SKILL.md, and the directory name is the skill name. A SKILL.md has front matter between two --- lines, then the body.

---
name: release-notes
description: "Use when writing release notes from a changelog or a list of merged changes."
featured: true
---

# Release notes

1. Group the changes by user-visible area.
2. Lead each group with the change people will notice.

Front matter fields

Field Required Meaning
name Yes The skill name. Same rules as above, and it must equal the directory name or the skill is skipped.
description Yes One line saying when the skill applies. Up to 1024 characters, no <tag> markup.
featured No true lists a system skill in the agent’s always-on catalog. Any other value, or no field, leaves it out.

The parser reads key: value lines, not full YAML. Keep each value on one line. A value wrapped in a matching pair of single or double quotes has the quotes removed. Other front matter keys are ignored.

A SKILL.md is skipped, without an error, when any of these hold:

  • The first line is not ---, or the closing --- line is missing.
  • name or description is missing, invalid, or empty.
  • The body after the front matter is empty.
  • name differs from the directory name.

The body is everything after the closing ---. It is plain Markdown. load_skill returns it in one piece, so a skill is a single SKILL.md and nothing beside it is read.

A user skill has the same three parts, but you edit them in the app as the Name and Description fields and the Markdown editor, so you never write front matter by hand.

Where NodeTool looks for system skills

On startup the agent loads system skills from the first of these that exists:

  1. The directory in NODETOOL_SYSTEM_SKILLS_DIR, if you set it. See Configuration.
  2. A _skills directory beside the bundled server, which is how the desktop app and the Docker image ship them.
  3. packages/system-skills in a source checkout.

How the agent finds and loads skills

Every chat turn carries a catalog of skills: the name and description of each of your own skills, plus the system skills marked featured: true. The remaining system skills are counted but not listed. That keeps the prompt short. The agent finds them by searching.

The agent reaches skills through five tools.

Tool What it does
list_skills Lists skills with name, description, and whether each is a system skill. An optional query matches word by word against name and description, and returns the best matches first.
load_skill Returns one skill’s full instructions by name. The agent calls it before acting on a skill the catalog only summarizes.
create_skill Creates a user skill from name, description, and content. All three are required.
update_skill Changes a user skill’s description, content, or name (through new_name). Only the fields passed change.
delete_skill Deletes a user skill permanently. The agent should ask first unless you asked for the deletion.

Both list_skills and load_skill read system and user skills. The three authoring tools refuse a system skill’s name. Names are matched in lowercase and a leading slash is ignored, so /Release-Notes and release-notes are the same skill.

The / slash command in chat

Type / at the start of a word in the chat composer to open a skill list. The list includes your skills and the built-in ones, and it filters by name and description as you type. Pick one and the composer inserts /<skill-name> into your message.

When a message names a skill this way, the agent receives that skill’s full instructions with the turn and follows them, with no load_skill round trip. A / inside a word, such as the path src/utils, does not count. The same picker appears in the prompt box on New project, where the chosen skill becomes the starter for the project. See Global Chat and User Interface.

Shipped skills

The list below comes from the directories in packages/system-skills. Each skill is available to the agent on every install, and you can open any of them read-only from the Skills panel. Type / and the name to use one in chat.

Video production

Skill Use it for
storyboard-core Storyboards, entity casting, rendering, and timeline assembly, including the tool contracts the other video skills quote.
product-commercial A polished product film or brand commercial.
ugc-video Phone-shot creator videos, UGC ads, testimonials, and vlogs.
script-video A video whose timing follows written voiceover, such as an explainer or narrated b-roll.
short-film A narrative scene, short film, or trailer with characters, dialogue, and score.
video-clone Analyzing a reference video and recreating its shot structure with a new product or cast.
video-workflow A reusable video workflow for batches or repeated inputs.
launch-kit A campaign with shared product and cast entities, stills, and several video cuts.
launch-commercial A launch commercial built from a product page URL, delivered as an editable project with its real cost.
motion-ad A short sound-off motion-graphics ad from a product’s real screenshots and photos.
commercial-beat-sheet A precisely timed commercial beat sheet stored as a storyboard.
explainer-storyboard A 30 to 120 second explainer storyboard from a confirmed brief.
music-video-treatment A beat-synced music-video treatment and storyboard from track metadata.
trailer-template A trailer or teaser structured as eight audio-first beats.
video-audio-continuity Keeping sound continuous across a multi-scene piece cut from generated video.
nodetool-video-post Repairing or regenerating footage already on a timeline: cutouts, upscaling, outpainting, lip sync, and more.

Motion and timeline craft

Skill Use it for
motion-graphics The entry point for building and reviewing a timeline piece.
timeline-edit-ops Reference for editing an existing timeline with edit_timeline ops.
motion-direction Setting one motion language for a piece and auditing a timeline against it.
motion-principles Timing, easing, stagger, anticipation, and follow-through.
motion-curves Animation curves written by hand or baked from a JavaScript body.
frame-composition Grids, focal placement, safe areas, depth, and camera moves.
beat-sync-editing Cutting to music and shaping pacing.
color-motion Colour, gradients, grades, and 3D LUTs.
caption-titles Titles, lower-thirds, captions, and end cards.
logo-reveal Animating a brand mark for an intro sting or end card.
motion-background Ambient backdrops and quiet loops.

Image, 3D, and games

Skill Use it for
nodetool-sketch Building and editing sketches: layers, blend modes, placed images, version history.
nodetool-3d-scene Building, editing, validating, and rendering 3D models.
native-game Building or revising a playable game in NodeTool’s built-in engine and preparing a web build.
game-direction Setting game feel, level pacing, and art direction before building.

Workflows, apps, and code

Skill Use it for
nodetool-workflow-builder Creating and editing workflow graphs, connections, and properties.
nodetool-app-builder Building or repairing a mini app.
nodetool-js-scripting JavaScript for the QuickJS sandbox: Code node bodies and saved JS scripts.
nodetool-custom-node-developer New TypeScript node types and node packages.
nodetool-rag-indexing Document ingestion, vector indexing, and retrieval pipelines.
nodetool-browser-agent Browser automation agents for navigation, extraction, and forms.
nodetool-troubleshooter Diagnosing a failing run on any surface, including stuck media generations.
nodetool-skill-author Writing or revising a skill, yours or a shipped one.

Model prompting guides

Each guide covers how one model line reads a prompt: the structure it expects, the controls that matter, and common failures. NodeTool points the agent to the matching guide when it picks a model.

Skill Model line
nano-banana-pro-prompting Google Nano Banana Pro (image)
gpt-image-2-prompting OpenAI GPT Image 2 (image)
flux-2-klein-prompting Black Forest Labs FLUX.2 [klein] (image)
seedream-prompting ByteDance Seedream 4 and 5 (image)
qwen-image-prompting Alibaba Qwen-Image (image, typography)
veo-3-prompting Google Veo 3 (video)
seedance-2-prompting ByteDance Seedance 2 (video)
kling-video-prompting Kuaishou Kling 2.5-turbo and later (video)
hailuo-prompting MiniMax Hailuo (video)
minimax-h3-prompting MiniMax H3 (video)
wan-2-6-prompting Alibaba Wan 2.6 (video)
elevenlabs-audio-prompting ElevenLabs speech, dialogue, sound effects, and music
stable-audio-prompting Stability Stable Audio (music and sound effects)

API and integration

Skill Use it for
nodetool-api-reference Integrating over REST, tRPC, WebSocket, MCP, or the OpenAI-compatible chat API.
nodetool-model-provider-config Providers, credentials, local models, and model selection.
nodetool-chat-cli Chat CLI sessions, provider selection, and Global Chat features.

The api-* skills document the nodetool object model that the agent calls from code actions. The agent loads one before its first call into that area.

Skill Covers
api-workflows nodetool.workflows, jobs, nodes
api-models nodetool.models
api-media nodetool.media, generations
api-assets nodetool.assets, documents
api-web nodetool.web, email
api-memory nodetool.memory, shared, threads
api-agents nodetool.agents
api-settings nodetool.settings, secrets
api-collections nodetool.collections
api-apps nodetool.apps
api-timelines nodetool.timelines
api-sketches nodetool.sketches
api-scripts nodetool.scripts
api-storyboards nodetool.storyboards
api-games nodetool.games

Operations

Skill Use it for
nodetool-deployment Deploying and operating servers and workers with Docker, SSH, Runpod, or cloud configuration.
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