Skip to content
Lattis Lattis

Skills

A Skill is a reusable bundle of know-how you give the model — a set of instructions (and optionally scripts and reference files) for doing a particular kind of task your way. Once a Skill exists, the model can open it by name when a task calls for it.

Why Skills

Section titled “Why Skills”

Pasting the same instructions into chat every time is tedious, and including all instructions in one prompt can increase the request size. Skills address both concerns: the model sees a short list of available Skills and loads a Skill’s full instructions only when it uses one.

Where Skills live

Section titled “Where Skills live”

Lattis loads Skills from two places:

LocationScope
The skills/ folder in your Lattis data directoryAvailable everywhere.
A .lattis/skills/ folder in a projectAvailable in that project.

Writing a Skill

Section titled “Writing a Skill”

A Skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file. The file has a short YAML header and then the instructions:

---
name: pdf-forms
description: Fill, flatten, and extract fields from PDF forms.
---


When asked to work with a PDF form:


1. Use `scripts/inspect.py` to list the form fields.
2. ...
  • name — lowercase letters, digits, and dashes (up to 64 characters), matching the folder name.
  • description — one line (up to ~1,000 characters) telling the model when to reach for this Skill. This is the part that’s always visible, so make it clear.

You can include supporting files alongside SKILL.md:

  • scripts/ — helper programs the Skill can run (executed directly, never loaded into the conversation).
  • references/ — longer documents the model reads only when needed.
  • assets/ — static files the Skill uses.

Add the folder, and the Skill is available next time the model needs it.

Next

Section titled “Next”