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Create a Skill Manually

Sometimes you want a skill that lives only in your agent — a personal playbook, a one-off automation, a private workflow you don't want to publish on GitHub. The Skills tab in your agent's terminal lets you write one directly, with no repo and no upload step.

Open the Skills tab​

  1. Go to your agent's terminal at bankr.bot/terminal.
  2. Open the settings panel.
  3. Select the Skills tab.

You'll see a list of every skill currently installed in your agent — both ones you've installed from GitHub and ones you've written here.

Add a new skill​

Click + Add at the top of the Skills tab. An editor opens with two areas:

  • A file tree on the left, starting with a single SKILL.md file.
  • An editor on the right where you write the file's contents.

Fill in the SKILL.md body. At minimum it needs YAML frontmatter with a name and description, followed by the markdown instructions your agent should follow. A starter looks like:

---
name: my-skill
description: One-line description of what this skill does and when it applies
tags: [trading, automation]
---

# My Skill

Step-by-step instructions for the agent...

When the user asks about X, do Y. If they ask about Z, follow the workflow in
references/z-workflow.md.

The description field is what your agent uses to decide when to load the skill, so write it clearly and concretely. See the SKILL.md format reference for the full set of frontmatter fields.

Add reference files​

For longer skills, you can split detail out into reference files so the main SKILL.md stays concise.

In the editor's left sidebar, click + Add reference and give the file a name (e.g. api-workflow.md). A new file appears under references/ and you can write its contents in the editor.

Reference files don't load automatically — the main SKILL.md should mention them by filename, and your agent will fetch them on demand. This keeps the always-in-context portion small while letting deep workflows stay available.

Save​

Click Create (or Save Changes when editing). Your agent picks the skill up immediately — no restart, no reload.

Edit or delete​

Each row in the Skills list has Edit and Delete buttons. Editing reopens the same editor with the skill's current contents. Deleting prompts for confirmation, then removes the skill and all its reference files.

When to write a skill manually vs. install from GitHub​

SituationBest path
Personal playbook, won't shareWrite it manually here
Reusable across team / publicPublish to GitHub and install from URL
Private but used across multiple agentsWrite manually in each, or host in a private GitHub repo and copy in

Next steps​