Skills¶
A skill is a document an agent loads when it recognises the work in front of it. Every skill kac ships lives in one
of three trees, and which tree it lives in decides who can read it and what moving it costs.
A skill travels into a corpus (one repository of knowledge records kept in git) where it governs a surface that corpus holds. A skill about C# or about this documentation site governs nothing a corpus has, so it stays here.
Every table below is written from the file that decides it, so none of them is a second answer that can drift.
What travels inside a plugin¶
These ship in the plugin bundle assembles, beside a frozen copy of the corpus export. They answer
from that export rather than from a network call.
An install gets a subset of these. A skill reading a record type the corpus did not export is trimmed, so what
somebody receives follows from what that corpus adopted. bundle prints what shipped and what it trimmed, and
bundle.json inside the plugin lists both.
Requires names the record types a skill opens a file of. A skill requiring none is one of two things.
standalone reads no export and serves whoever is holding the plugin, so it ships whatever the corpus adopted.
supporting exists for the lookup skills and follows the last of them out. The plugin
bundle says what the trim does to each.
A change to one of these moves the content-version of every corpus whose bundle ships it.
| Skill | What it answers | Requires |
|---|---|---|
corpus-retrieval |
Reach the published source of a record this corpus export summarises, and build a link somebody can follow | supporting |
glossary-lookup |
Look a term up in the knowledge corpus glossary that travels with this plugin | glossary@1 |
raise-finding |
File something you noticed about this corpus as an issue on the repository that publishes it | standalone |
request-deviation |
Ask the owner of a clause to accept a knowing departure from it, as an issue on the repository that publishes the corpus holding that clause | supporting |
controls-lookup |
Find out what proves a rule here, in the controls that travel with this plugin | controls@1 |
fix-lookup |
Find out whether somebody here has already solved this problem, in the fixes that travel with this plugin | fixes@2 |
policy-lookup |
Find what this estate is committed to, in the policy clauses that travel with this plugin | policies@2 |
process-lookup |
Find the procedure for a planned task, in the processes that travel with this plugin | processes@1 |
standards-lookup |
Find the rules you have to build to, in the standards that travel with this plugin | standards@1 |
What travels into a corpus¶
These arrive in a corpus's own working tree, under .claude/skills/. new writes them when the corpus
is created and update keeps them current, so a corpus owns a copy rather than reading this
repository.
The writing skills are for whoever is writing records, which is a different reader from the one who installed a
plugin. harvest-findings is for the corpus's maintainer: it triages the findings filed against the corpus and drafts
the record one of them asks for, so it writes to the tracker and to the records. Nothing here reads an export.
Adding, removing or renaming one of these moves version: in manifest.yaml, and upstream.template-version in
every corpus that took it, because a corpus has to respond. Rewording one moves neither: update sends the new words
and nothing about the corpus changes.
| Skill | What it answers |
|---|---|
technical-writing |
The writing floor for every word in this repository |
writing-a-record |
The shape of what a corpus holds |
writing-a-report |
Turn kac report <name> into a published report record, and bring an existing one up to date |
harvest-findings |
Triage the findings filed against this corpus, and draft the record one of them asks for |
What stays in this repository¶
These never leave. Each governs a surface no corpus has: the C# behind kac, the pages of this site, or the order of
work in the repository that publishes the framework.
They are listed so that their absence from a corpus is a stated answer rather than something you go looking for. A change to one moves no version stamp at all.
| Skill | What it answers |
|---|---|
i-want-to |
Route a piece of work in this repository to the process record or playbook carrying its steps |
writing-in-the-tool |
The shape of prose inside tooling/ |
writing-the-docs |
The shape of the public documentation |
Reading one¶
A skill is a Markdown file, and nothing stops you reading it. Whichever of the bundled ones survived the trim sit
under skills/ inside an installed plugin, and bundle.json beside them names the ones that did not. The rest are in
.claude/skills/ of whichever repository holds them.
A skill states its own rules in full rather than citing a standard, because it has to work in a checkout that holds no corpus. Where a corpus states the same rule, both say it, and the record is what a reviewer reads.