Installing Skills
Table of Contents
Skills are instruction files that teach your agent how to handle specific tasks. Think of them as playbooks: when a situation comes up, your agent reads the relevant skill and follows the steps. This guide covers how to find and install skills. For writing your own from scratch, see the Creating Custom Skills guide.
From the Skills Tab
The fastest way to add skills is from your agent's dashboard.
- Go to your agent's Settings tab
- Click Skills
- Type in the search box to find a skill (e.g., "email summary", "daily standup")
- Click Install on the skill you want
- Confirm in the dialog and restart your agent when prompted
Installed skills appear in a list below the search box. You can enable, disable, or uninstall them at any time.
Recommended Skills
When you first open the Skills tab, you may see a Recommended section with skills curated for your agent's role. These are based on the role you picked when creating your agent. Click Install on any recommendation to add it.
From a GitHub Repository
If someone has published a skill to GitHub, you can install it directly.
- Go to your agent's Skills tab
- Click Install from GitHub URL
- Paste the repository URL (e.g.,
https://github.com/username/my-skill) - Check the "I understand the risks" box (GitHub skills are not verified by Agento)
- Click Install and restart your agent
GitHub-installed skills show a yellow "Custom" badge instead of the green "Verified" badge.
By Asking Your Agent
You can ask your agent to create a skill on the fly in a chat conversation:
"Create a skill called daily-standup that reminds the team about standup format: what you did yesterday, what you're doing today, and any blockers."
Your agent writes the skill file directly into its workspace. These skills persist across restarts.
This is great for quick, personal skills that only your agent needs. For reusable skills you want to share or version-control, use the dashboard or GitHub methods instead.
Browse the Skills Marketplace
You can explore available skills without logging in at agento.host/skills. Each skill page shows:
- What the skill does and example use cases
- Security rating (Safe or Suspicious)
- Author, version, and tool count
- Full documentation
Click Install on Agent to jump to your dashboard and add it.
Managing Installed Skills
From the Skills tab, each installed skill has these options:
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Enable/Disable | Toggle the skill on or off without uninstalling it |
| Find Similar | Discover related skills based on what this one does |
| Uninstall | Remove the skill completely |
If you have many skills enabled (10+), you will see a warning about context overhead. Each skill adds to your agent's context window. Disable skills you are not actively using to keep things lean.
How Many Skills Should I Install?
We recommend keeping it under 10-12 active skills per agent. Every enabled skill adds instructions to your agent's context window, which means:
- Higher token usage per message (you pay for context on every turn)
- Lower quality responses as the agent has more instructions competing for attention
- Slower response times from processing a larger prompt
If your agent needs to handle very different jobs (e.g., customer support and internal reporting), consider creating separate agents instead of loading one agent with 20+ skills. Two focused agents will outperform one overloaded agent.
You can always disable skills you are not using right now and re-enable them later without losing configuration.
Tips
Start with one or two skills. Install a skill, test it in a real conversation, then add more as needed.
Disable instead of uninstalling. If you only need a skill occasionally, toggle it off. This removes it from the context window without losing the configuration.
Check the security rating. Verified marketplace skills are reviewed by Agento. GitHub skills are not. Only install custom skills from sources you trust.
Restart after installing. Most skill changes require an agent restart to take effect. The dashboard will prompt you when a restart is needed.