Skills

Skills are reusable instructions you hand to an agent so it works the way your team does. A skill might capture your brand voice, your quoting process, a coding convention, or anything else you’d otherwise re-explain in every conversation. Both Starcat and Starcat Developer can use skills.

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What a Skill Is

A skill is a short Markdown document with a name, a description, and a set of instructions. The description tells the agent when the skill applies; the body is the guidance it follows once loaded. Skills live in the /skills/ folder of your knowledge store, and an agent only pulls one in when it’s relevant, so they don’t clutter every conversation.

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Three Kinds of Skills

• Built-in — shipped by Stardeck and available to everyone. Creating Skills (below) and Auditing an App (below) are examples.
• Organization — shared across your organization and stored in your knowledge store. Anyone on your team can use them.
• Personal — private to you. Personal skills follow you across every organization you belong to, and no one else can see them.

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Using a Skill

Open the skills picker in the chat, select the skills you want, then send your message. The agent loads what you picked and follows it for that conversation. This works in both the Starcat chat and a project’s Starcat Developer chat. Starcat Developer also ships with its own built-in skills for common app-building tasks, which it loads on its own as it works.

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Creating an Organization Skill

The easiest way to create a skill is to let Starcat write it for you:

1. Open the skills picker and select the built-in Creating Skills skill.
2. Tell Starcat what the skill should cover and when it should apply.
3. Starcat writes a new skill document into your organization’s knowledge store. From then on it’s an organization skill anyone on your team can pick.

“Using Creating Skills, write a skill that captures our brand voice: friendly, concise, and free of jargon.”

You can also create and edit organization skills directly in the dashboard under Knowledge, where skills live in the skills/ folder. Use Add Item with a path like skills/brand-voice.md.

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Auditing an App

Auditing an App is a built-in skill that checks a project against the platform’s conventions instead of writing new code. Pick it from the skills picker in a project’s Starcat Developer chat and ask the agent to audit the app. It works through the app’s SDKs and platform guides one by one — the SDK SKILL.md docs, the app’s AGENTS.md, the design skills, and the ESLint rules — then reports what doesn’t follow them, grouped by severity, without touching your code unless you ask it to. Reach for it before shipping or handing off an app, or any time you want to confirm a project is built the way the platform expects.

“Using Auditing an App, audit this project and tell me what doesn’t follow platform conventions.”

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Personal Skills

From the skills picker you can manage your own collection:

• Save to personal — copy an organization skill into your personal collection so it stays with you.
• Upload as personal — upload your own .md skill file.
• Share to org — promote a personal skill to an organization skill so your team can use it.

Personal skills are visible only to you and travel with you across organizations.

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Writing a Good Skill

• Give it a clear name and a description that says when to use it. That’s how the agent decides to load it.
• Keep each skill focused on one thing. Several small skills beat one sprawling document.
• Write the instructions the way you’d brief a new teammate.

The built-in Creating Skills skill walks through the format in detail. Load it whenever you’re authoring a skill by hand.

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