> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.cogniagent.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # What skills are > A skill is your way of doing something, written down once — so your AI coworker does it your way every time instead of improvising. A skill is your way of doing something, written down once. After that, your coworker does it your way instead of inventing an approach each time. ## What it does Your coworker is capable without any skills at all. Ask it to research a company and it will do a reasonable job. But "reasonable" isn't "the way your team does it". Your competitive analyses have a particular shape. Your customer replies follow a house style. Your monthly report goes in a specific order because someone learned the hard way that it should. A skill captures that. Write the procedure once, and every task that needs it follows the same method. ## Instructions, skills, or memory? Three ways to shape behaviour, and picking the right one keeps each of them clean. | | For | Example | | -------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------- | | **[Instructions](/cowork/coworkers/instructions)** | Standing facts about the job | "You never contact customers directly." | | **Skills** | A procedure with a right way of doing it | How your team runs a competitive analysis | | **[Memory](/cowork/control/memory)** | Things it worked out along the way | "This person prefers bullet points." | The tell for a skill: **it has steps, and the order matters.** ## When you'd write one * A report that always follows the same structure * Your qualification process for an inbound lead * How a customer complaint should be handled, and when to escalate * The checks that run before anything goes out to a client * A monthly routine with six steps you keep re-explaining * Anything you've corrected your coworker on three times **The third correction is the signal.** Once you've explained the same preference three times, stop correcting and write a skill. ## How your coworker uses them Your coworker knows every skill it has by name and what each one is for — but it doesn't carry all the detail around. When a task calls for one, it opens that skill and follows it. That's why a coworker with twenty skills isn't slower or more confused than one with two. It only reads what it needs. Two ways a skill gets used: * **It picks one itself**, because the task matches what the skill is for. This is why the description matters — it's how your coworker recognises the moment. * **You call one by name** with `/skill-name`. See [Running a skill](/cowork/skills/running). ## Good to know Every coworker arrives with a couple of skills already — see [The built-in skills](/cowork/skills/built-in). The [ready-made coworkers](/cowork/coworkers/ready-made) come with several more, written for their role. Skills carry when you save a coworker as a template, so a well-written one benefits every coworker you hire from it afterwards. ## Common questions As many as its job genuinely has procedures. Five well-written ones beat twenty vague ones — a skill that only sometimes applies makes it harder to pick the right one. No. Start with none, notice what you keep correcting, and write skills for those. Skills earn their place; they aren't setup work. Yes — it proposes skills based on what it learned, and you approve them. See [Skills that improve themselves](/cowork/skills/improving). Skills belong to a coworker. To reuse one, save that coworker as a template and hire from it. ## Next steps Write your first one. Call one by name. What every coworker already knows. Specialists for one part of a job.