Skills: Reusable Playbooks

What it is#

Skills are Markdown playbooks in skills/. Each has a description frontmatter that tells Eve when it's useful. The agent loads the skill only when the task calls for it.

Why you'd care#

Instead of stuffing every procedure into instructions.md, you keep focused guidance available on demand — smaller prompt, sharper behavior.

Before#

A long research procedure lives in instructions.md, bloating every request.

After#

---
description: Research unfamiliar topics
---

When the task is novel or ambiguous, gather evidence first, then answer.
1. Identify the smallest set of questions that resolve the ambiguity.
2. Search primary sources; note where each fact comes from.
3. Summarize findings before drawing conclusions.

The agent pulls in deep_research only when a research-shaped task arrives.

Do it yourself#

1. Create agent/skills/deep_research.md with the content above.
2. Run eve dev and ask a genuinely research-y question.
3. Confirm the agent followed the playbook's steps.

Gotchas#

• The description is how Eve decides relevance — write it for discovery, not just humans.
• Skills are not always in context; they're loaded on demand.

Recap#

skills/ gives the agent on-demand expertise without inflating the prompt. Next, we let people actually talk to it.