Skill Tools
Tools that agents use to interact with the skill system — listing and loading skills on demand.
Skill tools let agents discover and load skills discovered at strategy load time. Skills are advertised in the agent's system prompt as one-line summaries; agents can list them all or load a specific one when needed.
Tools at a glance
| Tool | Purpose |
|---|---|
list_skills | List all registered skills with their names, descriptions, and origins. No content is returned — use load_skill for that. |
load_skill | Load the full markdown body of a named skill advertised in the system prompt. |
How it fits together
- Skills are discovered from
<workspace>/.comma/skills/and the global config directory at strategy load time. See Skills for authoring and discovery details. - Each skill's name and description appear as a line in the
## Available Skillsblock in the agent's system prompt. - The agent can call
list_skillsto see all available skills and their descriptions programmatically. - When the agent determines a skill is relevant, it calls
load_skillwith the skill's name. - The tool returns the full markdown body, which stays in context for the rest of the turn.
The skill tools bridge the skill system's discovery layer and the agent's runtime context. If no skill registry is wired into the agent, both tools return skill_unavailable — a clear signal to stop attempting skill operations for the rest of the turn.