Skills

Skills are reusable instructions you hand to an agent so it works the way your team does. A skill might capture your brand voice, your quoting process, a coding convention, or anything else you'd otherwise re-explain in every conversation. Both Starcat and Starcat Developer can use skills.

What a Skill IsCopy Anchor Link

A skill is a short Markdown document with a name, a description, and a set of instructions. The description tells the agent when the skill applies; the body is the guidance it follows once loaded. Skills live in the /skills/ folder of your knowledge store, and an agent only pulls one in when it's relevant, so they don't clutter every conversation.

Three Kinds of SkillsCopy Anchor Link

• Built-in: shipped by Stardeck and available to everyone. Examples: Creating Skills, Auditing an App, Audit Tests.
• Organization: shared across your organization and stored in your knowledge store. Anyone on your team can use them.
• Personal: private to you. Personal skills follow you across every organization you belong to, and no one else can see them.

Using a SkillCopy Anchor Link

Open the skills picker in the chat, select the skills you want, then send your message. The agent loads what you picked and follows it for that conversation. This works in both the Starcat chat and a project's Starcat Developer chat.

Starcat Developer also ships with its own built-in skills for common app-building tasks, which it loads on its own as it works.

From your coding agentCopy Anchor Link

A coding agent connected over MCP lists and loads skills with listStardeckSkills and loadStardeckSkill: Stardeck's app-building skills, your personal skills and your organization's skills. The connection's role needs agent:skills:execute. The picker's built-in skills below are for the Stardeck chats.

Creating an Organization SkillCopy Anchor Link

The easiest way to create a skill is to let Starcat write it for you:

1. Open the skills picker and select the built-in Creating Skills skill.
2. Tell Starcat what the skill should cover and when it should apply.
3. Starcat writes a new skill document into your organization's knowledge store. From then on it's an organization skill anyone on your team can pick.

"Using Creating Skills, write a skill that captures our brand voice: friendly, concise, and free of jargon."

You can also create and edit organization skills directly in the dashboard under Knowledge, where skills live in the skills/ folder. Use Add Item with a path like skills/brand-voice.md.

Built-in Audit SkillsCopy Anchor Link

Pick these from the skills picker in a project's Starcat Developer chat:

• Auditing an App: checks the project against platform conventions (SDK SKILL.md docs, the app's AGENTS.md, design skills, ESLint rules). Reports issues by severity. Doesn't change code unless you ask. Use before shipping or handing off.
• Audit Tests: checks what the tests prove, including whether they mock away the seam where a bug would live, then writes the missing tests. See Testing.

Personal SkillsCopy Anchor Link

From the skills picker you can manage your own collection:

• Save to personal: copy an organization skill into your personal collection so it stays with you.
• Upload as personal: upload your own .md skill file.
• Share to org: promote a personal skill to an organization skill so your team can use it.

Personal skills are visible only to you and travel with you across organizations.

Writing a Good SkillCopy Anchor Link

• Give it a clear name and a description that says when to use it. That's how the agent decides to load it.
• Keep each skill focused on one thing. Several small skills beat one sprawling document.
• Write the instructions the way you'd brief a new teammate.

The built-in Creating Skills skill walks through the format in detail. Load it whenever you're authoring a skill by hand.

RelatedCopy Anchor Link