Skills are markdown files that teach the agent specific capabilities: a workflow, a domain, or a set of practices. They remain available on demand without placing every full file into the opening context.
Open Agent Capabilities → Skills to view, edit, create, and choose always-on behavior. Files under ~/.kiro/crew/skills/ can also be edited directly; changes apply on the next agent invocation.
By default, skills.max_triggered is 0. Per-message trigger injection is disabled, but discovery remains available.
| Mode | How it works |
|---|---|
| Always-on | The Skill's full content is injected into every eligible session |
| On-demand (default) | The agent receives a usage-ranked index with each Skill's name, description, and path; it can read one directly or use skill_search to find others |
| Triggered | A matching Skill is injected when skills.max_triggered is greater than 0 |
Set skills.max_triggered to a positive integer to allow at most that many trigger-matched Skills per message. This changes trigger injection only; 0 does not disable on-demand loading or skill_search.
Crew ships with Skills for common workflows, including CLI guidance, pull request preparation, artifacts, widgets, browser verification, and long-running goals. The exact catalog changes with the installed version; use the Skills panel or skill_search for the current list.
Settings → Skills → Discover can import one Skill or every Skill in a public GitHub repository. Each import is pinned to the commit it resolved at install time:
acme/widgets acme/widgets@v2 acme/widgets:skills/reviewer acme/widgets@v2:skills/reviewer
The import is a snapshot, not a subscription. Re-import the same address to review and apply a newer revision. The agent can inspect a registry Skill with skill_fetch, but installing one remains a dashboard action.
Create ~/.kiro/crew/skills/my-skill/SKILL.md manually or select New under Agent Capabilities → Skills:
--- name: my-skill description: Explains how to do X in our codebase. triggers: [deploy, release, ship] always: false --- # My Skill When the user asks about deploying: 1. Run the test suite first 2. Check the staging environment 3. Use the deploy script at scripts/deploy.sh
The triggers field matters only when skills.max_triggered is positive. For on-demand Skills, write a clear name and description so the agent can find the Skill through skill_search.
Skills