What are Skills

Skills are reusable packages of instructions, knowledge and tools that you can share across multiple agents. Think of them as specialized toolboxes that contain the knowledge and capabilities needed for specific tasks or domains.

Dust comes with default skills, but you can also create your own. Check out our examples.

When to create a skill

• Create a skill to share instructions and tools across multiple agents.
• Create a skill when your agent instructions are getting overly long and/or you want to move specialized knowledge into a reusable package to share with your team.
• Create a skill to define standard ways of doing things in your organization.

Skills are shareable, when you update a skill's instructions, every agent using that skill automatically gets the improvement. It's a way to create a single source of truth for how certain things should be done.

Creating a skill

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Skill creation and edition is reserved to Builders and Admins. Any user can leverage existing skills.
Builders are therefore responsible for making great skills to share with the company!

Name and description: A clear name and description that helps users understand what the skill does and what will it can be used for.

What will this skill be used for: indications that will be used by the agent to determine when to enable the skill.

What guidelines should it provide: actual content of the skill; instructions that explain how to perform specific tasks, how to use particular tools, and document any company-specific processes or conventions.

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You can reference knowledge such as Notion pages, Google Drive documents, Confluence pages naturally in your instructions either by pressing / or by pressing the "Attach knowledge" button.
This opens a search bar from where you can search content by title. Alternatively, you can paste the URL of the content to reference, whether it is a Zendesk ticket, a Notion page, a GitHub issue, ...

When you add knowledge to a skill, agents using that skill automatically get the ability to search and browse this knowledge.
On the technical side of thing, the search is powered by the filesystem abstraction detailed here. Agents using the skill will be able to run semantic searches, read entire files, search for files by name and browse the hierarchy.

Tools (optional): You can include MCP tools to the skill.

Creating a customized version of a global skill

Global skills are pre-built skills provided by Dust that cover common use cases. You can customize a global skill to adapt it to your organization's specific needs while keeping its core functionality.

For instance, you can customize the Create Frames skills to provide additional guidelines on your branding, the assets to use (which can be directly referenced in the skill as mentioned above) and the type of layout to generate.

To extend a global skill, go to Manage Skills, find the global skill you want to customize, click the ... menu, and select Customize skill. This creates a new skill based on the global one, where you can add your own instructions, attach specific knowledge, or include additional tools. The customized skill will be labeled as "Based on [original skill name]" to indicate its origin. Any updates you make to your extended skill won't affect the original global skill, and other teams can create their own extensions independently.

How agents use skills

You can add skills to your agents in the Agent Builder. Select specific skills to add to your agent. The agent will have the ability to rely on those skills to perform complex tasks and achieve the goal defined in the agent’s instructions or in your questions.

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The agent will decide to enable the skill by analyzing the current situation. Skills that are not relevant will not be loaded, optimizing the context exposed to the agent at a given time. Think Neo in the Matrix when he gets martial arts instructions uploaded to his head and acquires a new skill: “I know kung fu”.

Managing access to skills

Both the data access (what data the skill can use) and the user access (who can use the skill) are handled through spaces.

When you create a skill, the skill may rely on resources coming from specific spaces; e.g. Notion page in the Product space, Zendesk tickets in the Customer Success space, etc... To ensure the data is only accessible to those who have access to the same spaces, the skill is scoped to a set of spaces that are required to use it. An agent can only use a skill if it has access to every space required by the skill. This ensures skills respect your data permissions: if a skill gives access to data from space A, then any agent that uses this skill necessarily needs to have access to space A. This relationship between skills and agents is live, meaning that any update on a skill to request more access is reflected in the agent.

Editors: You designate who can edit the skill. Editors can modify the skill's instructions, tools, and settings.

Keeping track of a skill's evolution

Skills are versioned: in Skill Builder in the header line of the Guidelines section the history button will allow you to list all past versions with their date and author. Clicking on a version allows you to visualize the changes made since then, easily tracking additions and deletions.

Getting started

Identify a few processes that could be turned into Skills : Good candidates are usually recurring processes that need to be documented, or set of guidelines that are often required for agents to work well. Turn them into a skill and add this skill to your agents. Tweak the skill as needed, you only need to change it once to keep all the linked agents up-to-date.

Over time, you'll build a library of skills that will make creating new agents faster and more consistent.

FAQ

• Who can create and edit skills?

  Builders can create and edit skills. Ask an admin to bump your role if you want to get creative and unlock value for your co-workers!

• Who can view and use skills?

  Anyone in your workspace can view and use skills, if they do have access to every underlying resources (tools and knowledge).

• How do I add knowledge to a skill?

  In the Skill Builder you can add knowledge references inline in the guidelines; you can start describing your guidelines and state what knowledge is required in the same sentence: I can start typing "Please look at the" then press / or press the Attach knowledge button on the top right and then search for the relevant content by starting to type its title. I'd end up with "Please look at the [2026 Planning] and ...".
  Pasting an URL is also possible to retrieve the associated content.

• What does this change for Frames and Go deep?

  Frames and Go deep are now available as skills instead of tools. This change is retro-compatible for existing agents. What changes is that this adds the option to customize Frame creation, for instance to include your own branding, add guidelines on the layout or the content for instance.
  Another more subtle change is that the skill will be loaded dynamically, keeping the context lighter for the agent when not needed, making it more focused and less prone to hallucinations.

  ⚠️ This change will cause existing agents to be less prone to create Frames. Agents used to have a strong tendency to create Frames whatever the context as long as the tool was added, even in situations where it was not called for. You may need to update agent instructions accordingly.

• Do I need to re-write all my agent instructions?

  No, existing agents will continue to work exactly as before. You should build Skills and replace redundant agent instructions gradually, as you iterate and standardize your agent library.

• What is the relationship between Dust’s Skills and Anthropic/Claude Skills?

  They’re a similar concept, applied in a different product: in their essence, they both represent a re-usable bundle of instructions and best practices to perform a task, up to your standards. We recommend checking out Anthropic skills, and others to find inspiration! For example, Notion published a few Skill prompts that you could use in Dust too!

• When should I use a Skill or a sub-agent?

  Use Skills to share reusable expertise (instructions + tools) across multiple agents: they compose seamlessly and update everywhere when changed. Use sub-agents only when you need true context isolation (e.g., heavy independent research). Skills is the default choice for sharing sets of guidelines across multiple agents, as sub-agents introduce prompting coordination overhead. If your intent is to extend your agent's capabilities, then a skill is definitely the way to go.

• How do I know whether a certain skill was used for a message

  In your conversation click on the "Completed in n sec" message to open the details panel.
  At the bottom you will find a summary and a list of the skills that were loaded and exposed to the agent for this message.