Skills

A skill is a work instruction for a recurring task, such as “review a quote” or “write minutes”. You attach skills to an agent. When a request matches a skill's description, the agent fetches the instruction itself and follows it.

The skills pages are currently only available in German. This page names each button and field as it appears in the app, with a translation in parentheses.

You manage skills under Agenten → Skills (agents → skills, /agents/skills).

Three kinds

The built-in skills are currently Besprechungsprotokoll (meeting minutes), Geschäftliche Antwort (business reply) and Vertragsklauseln prüfen (review contract clauses).

Attaching skills to an agent

In the agent, tick the boxes under Skills and save.

• At most 20 skills per agent. The counter shows “N von 20” (N of 20); the first 20 are saved.
• If two selected skills share a name, the agent only uses the first. Saving tells you so.
• Only models that can use tools load skills. For other models the form shows “Dieses Modell lädt keine Skills” (this model does not load skills).
• Scheduled jobs with an agent use its skills as well.
• For models with a small context window, SovrGPT shortens the descriptions in the agent's skill list and, if necessary, leaves out the last skills.

Choosing a skill yourself: /skill

Usually the agent decides on its own whether a skill fits the task. In a chat with an agent you can also pick it yourself:

1. Type / or /skill into the empty input field. The list of this agent's skills opens, with description and origin. Typing further filters it.
2. Select with the arrow keys and confirm with Enter (or click). The skill appears as a label above the field; ✕ removes the choice.
3. Write your message and send it. The skill applies to this one message.

• The agent has already loaded the skill when it starts answering. The skill is checked exactly as if the agent had loaded it itself: approval, version and, for personal skills, ownership.
• The list is empty if the chat runs without an agent, the agent has no skills or the model cannot use tools.
• With models that have a small context window, the list only shows the skills that fit into the agent's skill list. The skills left out at the end cannot be chosen there either.
• A chosen skill is still just instructions: it grants no rights and overrides no rule.

Personal skills

• Private: only you can see, edit, export and delete them, not owners or admins either. Nothing is written to the audit log.
• Per organisation, at most 50 per person and organisation.
• No approval: what you save applies from the next request.
• Only in your own agents and only in your chats. If someone else chats with your agent, they get the built-in and company skills, not your personal ones. Others can at most see that a private skill is attached, never which one.
• A company template made from your agent does not include personal skills.
• If you leave the organisation, your personal skills there are deleted.

Company skills

Company skills exist only in team organisations, not in the personal workspace. Owners and admins create and manage them. Members see and use the approved version.

1. Create a draft: a new skill or a new version of an existing one (section Neue Fassung, new version). Each skill has at most one open draft. Until approval, agents keep using the previous version.
2. Review the findings: SovrGPT checks the draft and points out passages a skill rarely needs, such as web addresses, tool names, keys or wording that tries to override rules. Findings do not block, but before approving you confirm with a checkbox that you have seen them.
3. Approve or reject (Fassung N freigeben, approve version N, or Entwurf ablehnen, reject draft). After approval, all agents use this version from the next request on, including in ongoing chats.

Four-eyes principle: if the organisation has at least two owners or admins, the draft must be approved by someone other than its author. If there is only one such person, they may approve it themselves. They confirm this with a checkbox, and the version is marked as self-approved.

Later, the skill's page offers these steps:

• Every version stays unchanged. A change creates a new version; the name stays fixed.
• Every step is recorded in the organisation's audit log, with the skill's ID and, where a version is involved, the version number, never with content.
• At most 200 company skills per organisation (archived ones count) and 100 versions per skill.

Content and limits

Rejected characters. In all fields: Unicode tag characters, characters that switch the writing direction, and control characters other than tab and line break. In name, description and licence also invisible characters such as the zero-width space. In the instructions, invisible characters and XML tags only produce a finding.

Composite emoji and emoji with skin tones are allowed. The flags of England, Scotland and Wales are rejected because they are made of tag characters.

What a skill cannot do

• No permissions, no tools. Which tools and connections an agent has is set by the agent and the organisation. An instruction changes nothing about that, even if it names a tool.
• The allowed-tools field of a SKILL.md is ignored.
• No scripts. A skill runs nothing. The scripts/ folder of a skill package is discarded on import, even if it only contains text.
• Text only. Images, fonts, templates such as .pptx and other binary files are discarded on import.

Skill packages (ZIP) with files

Besides its instructions, a skill can bring text files, such as price lists, wording examples or tables. The agent reads them only when it needs them: it first loads the skill, then reads the file the instructions name.

Import on the Neuer eigener Skill (new personal skill) or Neuer Firmen-Skill (new company skill) page: the same file picker as for a SKILL.md, just with a ZIP archive. The archive is recognised by its content, not its extension. A company skill is saved as a draft here too.

What is discarded – the import continues, and the page tells you afterwards:

• Files with other extensions (images, fonts, templates), large ones included.
• Files that are not UTF-8 text, and empty files.
• The scripts/ folder.
• System files such as __MACOSX/, .DS_Store and Thumbs.db. They still count towards the limit of 50 entries: the macOS Finder adds a companion file ._<name> to many files. If a package is rejected for this reason, pack it again in the terminal, for example with zip -r package.zip folder -x '*.DS_Store' – this creates neither __MACOSX/ nor ._ files.

What rejects the import: a text file over 256 KB, a file name that breaks the rules or contains umlauts, more than one folder level, a missing or duplicate SKILL.md, and Unicode tag characters or characters that switch the writing direction in any file. The instructions refer to their files by name; silently discarding one would break that reference.

SovrGPT removes a byte order mark (BOM) at the start of a file and composes decomposed characters, such as umlauts from macOS. After that, every file gets the same check as the instructions: passages such as web addresses or wording that tries to override rules produce a notice.

Viewing files. The skill's page lists the files with their size. A click shows the text as plain text, with the check's notices for that file. For company skills, members see the files of approved versions, owners and admins also those of the draft. Look at every file before approving. If the check found passages in files, confirm this with the tick box before approving.

Editing.

• Personal skill: on its page you add a text file (at the top or in a folder such as references), replace a file with a new version or remove it. When replacing, the name inside the skill stays the same, whatever the uploaded file is called. Every change saves a new version. If you only change the description or the instructions, the files are kept.
• Company skill: the Neue Fassung (new version) form lists every file of the version the form was pre-filled from with a tick box – untick it and the file is left out of the new version. You can also upload new files; a file with the name of a kept one replaces it. One draft with all files is saved; the previous version stays unchanged.
• Uploaded files follow the same rules as in a ZIP package (extensions, names, 256 KB per file, 49 files, 2 MB in total), plus at most 1 MB at once. Unlike the ZIP import, nothing is discarded silently: a file that does not fit stops the save with a message. Files cannot be put into the scripts/ folder.

Comparing. Fassungen vergleichen (compare versions) also shows the files of company skills: which were added, removed or changed. For a changed file, Unterschiede ansehen (show differences) shows the changed lines.

Export. Skills with files download as a ZIP package (Als ZIP-Paket herunterladen or Fassung N als ZIP-Paket herunterladen). The package contains a folder named after the skill, with the SKILL.md and all files inside. It can be imported again unchanged; the content checksum stays the same. If even one file cannot be read just now, there is no package – never an incomplete one.

Where the files are stored. In a private SovrGPT store in the EU, reachable only through the server. If you delete a personal skill or leave the organisation, its files are removed.

Import and export as SKILL.md

Import on the Neuer eigener Skill (new personal skill) or Neuer Firmen-Skill (new company skill) page: choose a .md file or paste the text. For a package with files see Skill packages (ZIP) with files.

• A single SKILL.md in UTF-8, at most 96 KB, with a header between two --- lines.
• Required in the header: name and description. license and the instructions below are imported as well.
• compatibility, metadata and unknown fields are discarded, allowed-tools is ignored. The page tells you after the import.
• The same check as for manual creation applies. A company skill is saved as a draft and only applies after approval.
• The licence block for docx, pdf, pptx and xlsx applies here too (see Content and limits). Only on import do other restrictive licence statements produce a finding.

Export on a skill's page: for personal skills with Als SKILL.md herunterladen (download as SKILL.md), for company skills with Fassung N als SKILL.md herunterladen (download version N as SKILL.md). If the skill has files, you get a ZIP package instead (see above).

• Only you can export your personal skills.
• All members can export company skills, always the version in use. A draft cannot be exported.
• The header contains name, description, license where present, and under metadata the source, version and a checksum of the content.