Skills
What is a skill, and why bundle one?
A skill is a verifiable, signed playbook an agent runs. Here is why they exist, what makes one good, and how the registry surfaces them.
By amitte
The short version
A skill in Amitte is a signed, versioned, machine-runnable playbook an AI agent can pull from a registry and execute. Think of it as the "npm package, but for agent procedures."
A skill is structured around three contracts:
- A manifest that declares its name, version, license, dependencies,
and signing material — exactly like
package.jsondoes for an npm module. - A body (typically
SKILL.md) with the actual playbook — step-by-step instructions an agent runs. - A trust tier the registry assigns:
unverified,community, orverified. Verification requires a signed claim from the publisher's domain.
Why bundle a skill instead of just prompting?
Three reasons:
- Composition. A skill can depend on other skills the way functions depend on libraries. The registry resolves the dependency graph for you. Without a skill format, every team rewrites the same prompt for "publish to TestFlight" or "bisect a flaky test" from scratch.
- Verification. Signing means consumers can check provenance — a
skill claiming to be from
stripe/is actually from Stripe, not a typosquatter. This matters more once agents start running real actions on behalf of users. - Evolution. Versioned skills can be improved over time without breaking dependents. Semver is unglamorous but it's the reason npm works at all.
What makes a good skill?
Every published skill we've seen succeed shares a few traits:
- One job, well-defined. "Deploy to TestFlight" is a skill; "Build mobile apps" is a domain.
- Verifiable end state. A skill that can't tell when it's done is a skill that loops forever.
- Bounded inputs. If the agent has to ask the user 12 questions before running, the skill is doing two things.
- Real grounding. The best skills cite real APIs, real CLIs, real error messages — not "you might want to look at the docs."
Try it
- Browse
/search?type=skillto see what publishers have shipped. - Run
amitte pull <publisher>/<skill>to pull a skill into a local bundle. - Read the publishing guide when you're ready to ship one of your own.