AI Agents are increasingly capable, but often don’t have the context they need to do real work reliably. Agent Skills solve this by giving agents access to procedural knowledge and company-, team-, and user-specific context they can load on demand. Agents with access to a set of skills can extend their capabilities based on the task they’re working on. Refer (Agent) Skills to learn more about the agent skills.
Structure
Agent Skills are folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that agents can discover and use to do things more accurately and efficiently. Each skill is a directory containing a SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter and instructions.
Code
How skills work?
Skills work differently from MCP tools. An agent uses skills to teach itself how to use tools. It loads bundled skills plus optional local overrides, and filters them at load time based on environment, config, and binary presence. For example, it would read the SKILL.md file and execute the curl commands described in the skill, rather than calling a pre-built tool.
How the agent selects skills?
The agent matches your request to a skill using the name and description fields in the frontmatter of each SKILL.md. This is why those descriptions are written in natural language — they're what the agent scans to decide which skill to load. The full skill content is only loaded into context once selected, keeping things efficient.
What can a skill enable?
- Domain expertise: Package specialized knowledge into reusable instructions, from legal review processes to data analysis pipelines.
- New capabilities: Give agents new capabilities (e.g. creating presentations, building MCP servers, analyzing datasets).
- Repeatable workflows: Turn multi-step tasks into consistent and auditable workflows.
- Interoperability: Reuse the same skill across different skills-compatible agent products.
ChannelSeal Agent Skills
ChannelSeal provides two kinds of agent skills:
- Resource Skills are skills that operate on a single API resource.
- Process Skills model business workflows using one or more resources.
You can always create your own process skills as per needs using the resource skills provided.
How process skills differ from resource skills?
| Resource Skills | Process Skills | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | One resource type | Multiple resources |
| Use case | CRUD operations | Business workflows |
| Steps | Single API call | 4–7 orchestrated steps |
| Output | Raw API response | Structured report or summary |
| User | Developer / admin | Analyst / operator / auditor |
Installation
This section provides common installation instructions fto use any skill.
Get OAuth2 Token
ChannelSeal APIs use the OAuth2 client credentials flow for authentication, so get the token first by following instructions on Authentication.
Set the environment variables
All skills require the following environment variables. Add these to your AI agent's environment (e.g. in ~/.<your agent dir>/.env or your system env):
| Variable | Description |
|---|---|
CHANNELSEAL_BASE_URL | Base URL of the ChannelSeal server (e.g. https://env.channelseal.com/platform) |
CHANNELSEAL_TOKEN | OAuth2 Bearer token (client credentials flow via https://dev-channelseal.us.auth0.com/oauth/token) |
where
env would be api for production and uat for UAT
Install skills
Identify the skills you want to use from the following:
Copy and save
Following describes common installation steps for a skill.
- Visit the skill page
- Click
Copy pagedropdown. - Select
Open Markdown page. This opens the SKILL.md in a browser tab. - Right click anywhere on the page and click
Save. - Select your agent's skills folder and save the file
SKILL.md. Since, all skills use the nameSKILL.md, you may want to save each file under a folder named after the skill. e.g. (~/.<your agent>/skills/chanelseal/channels/SKILL.md)
Note: ChannelSeal would expose these and more skills in a github repository in future.
Reference
- What are skills? Claude
- Agent Skills specifications
- How to add skills support to your agent
- Extend Claude with skills
- Skills in ChatGPT
- Creating Skills for OpenClaw
- ClawHub public skill registry for OpenClaw