Skills

PoorMad's unit of learned capability — write, recall, and apply.

Skills are PoorMad's unit of learned capability — reusable procedures the agent can write, recall, and apply.

What a skill is

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md (frontmatter + markdown body), and optionally references, scripts, and templates. It encodes a workflow the agent has learned so it does not re-derive it each time.

Writing a skill

Ask the agent to capture a repeated task, or author one directly:

# skills/shell-audit/SKILL.md
---
name: shell-audit
description: Audit shell history for risky patterns and suggest aliases.
---
1. Read ~/.bash_history (last 200 lines).
2. Flag sudo/rm -rf/curl|sh patterns.
3. Propose three aliases from frequent commands.

How skills load

• Skills are indexed at startup from ~/.poormad/skills/.
• The agent selects a skill when its description matches the task.
• Trigger conditions and numbered steps keep execution deterministic.

Best practices

• One idea per skill. Name it for the job, not the tool.
• Keep the body step-by-step; the agent follows it literally.
• Store environment-specific data in config.yaml, not in the skill.