Skills

A skill is a reusable unit of work, written as a SKILL.md file under <domain>/skills/. It captures how to do something — “synthesize this month’s wealth changes,” “review a lease for red flags” — so a workflow you figured out once becomes a one-click action forever after.

Like everything in the vault, skills are just markdown. Edit them in any editor, share them via git, no special tooling required.

Anatomy of a skill

---
name: Monthly Wealth Review
description: Synthesize this month's changes across the wealth domain
type: distilled
source_session_id: 2026-06-04-a91f
created_at: 2026-06-04
---

## How to use
Run at month-end to roll up account changes into a single brief.

## Inputs
- **month** (optional): which month to review; defaults to the current one.

## Steps
1. Read `state.md` — net worth, account balances, recent decisions.
2. Compute the delta versus last month's brief in `02_briefs/`.
3. Format as a table plus a one-paragraph narrative.
4. Write the result to `02_briefs/YYYY-MM-DD_monthly-review.md`.

## Outputs
- A markdown brief in `02_briefs/`.

The frontmatter is optional metadata; the body is plain instructions an agent follows.

Where skills come from

Source	How
Distilled	/distill turns the conversation you just had into a SKILL.md draft
Hand-written	Create skills/<name>/SKILL.md yourself in any editor
Shared	Drop a skill someone published into your domain’s skills/ folder

Distilling a conversation

The fastest path. After a useful exchange:

/distill

Prevail reads the conversation and writes a structured skill draft — name, description, steps, outputs — into the domain’s skills/. Tidy it up and it’s ready to reuse. (/skill is an alias.)

Running skills

• In the cockpit, each domain’s skills tab lists its skills and lets you toggle which ones the chair may call.
• When you open a domain, the agent is told which skills are available, so you can simply ask for one by name.
• Connector skills (a different thing — they sync app data) are run from the shell with prevail connectors run. See Using connectors.

Why markdown skills

Because a skill is just a file:

• Versioned — git log skills/ is the history of how a workflow evolved.
• Portable — copy one between domains or share it with someone running Prevail.
• Inspectable — there’s no hidden behavior; the steps are right there in plain text.