Skills in Skills: Compose Skills and Tools Directly Within Your Instructions

🎯 What is it?

You can now reference skills and tools directly inside your skill instructions, the same way you already reference knowledge. Skills can call on other skills, letting you build richer, more modular capabilities by combining existing building blocks. As part of this change, the separate "tools" section has been removed, and tools are now inserted inline wherever you need them.

💡 Why is it useful?

Until now, skills stood on their own and couldn't draw on one another, which often meant duplicating the same logic across multiple skills. This update responds to a widely requested ability to compose skills, so you can assemble specialized capabilities into more complete workflows without rebuilding them each time.

⚙️ How does it work?

When editing a skill's instructions, you simply use a dropdown to insert a reference to another skill or to a tool inline, exactly as you would when adding knowledge. The referenced skill or tool becomes part of that skill's behavior, so capabilities can be layered and reused.

✨ Concrete Use Cases

Here's how you could use it:

Building on existing skills: Create a "Weekly Report" skill that references your existing "Data Retrieval" and "Summarization" skills, rather than duplicating that logic.
Inline tool placement: Insert a specific tool exactly at the point in your instructions where it's needed, making the skill's behavior clearer and easier to maintain.

📈 Benefits for you

Less duplication, easier maintenance, and far more flexibility when designing skills. By composing skills from smaller, reusable pieces, you can build sophisticated agents faster and keep them consistent over time.

🚀 How to access it?

The feature is available to everyone. When editing a skill, use the dropdown within the instructions to insert a reference to another skill or a tool. Your existing skills have already been updated automatically: the list of tools previously associated with a skill now appears at the top of its instructions, so nothing is lost in the transition.

No action is required on your part, your existing skills continue to work as before. This is simply a new way to compose and reuse them going forward.