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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 section of your agent's terminal lets you write one directly, with no repo and no upload step.

Open the Skills section​

Go to bankr.bot/skills. Your skills lists the skills you've written, and Installed skills the ones you've added from GitHub or the catalog.

Add a new skill​

Click Create Skill and choose Code editor. (Ask Bankr instead describes the skill in chat and lets the agent write it; Fork & pull request is for contributing to the public catalog.) 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​

Open a skill from Your skills to find Edit skill and Delete. Editing reopens the same editor with the skill's current contents. Deleting asks you to confirm, then removes the skill and all its reference files.

You can also ask Bankr in chat to change part of a skill, or to add, replace or remove its references and scripts. Every content change bumps the skill's version, and on a public skill sends it back to review.

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​