Skills

Skills are modular, markdown-defined capabilities that give the AI agent structured guidance for specific domains. Instead of relying on general prompting for every task, skills package up the right instructions and tool configurations for a job — and the agent picks them up automatically.

What Is a Skill?

A skill is a SKILL.md file that contains:

• A description of what the skill handles
• Structured prompts and instructions for that domain
• Tool configurations relevant to the task
• Examples and constraints

When you ask the agent to do something, it scans available skills and incorporates any that are relevant — automatically, without you needing to invoke them by name.

skills/
  browser-automation/
    SKILL.md
  code-exec/
    SKILL.md
  http/
    SKILL.md
  my-custom-skill/
    SKILL.md

Bundled Skills

Talon ships with a set of ready-to-use skills covering common developer workflows.

browser-automation

Control a real browser to interact with web pages, fill forms, take screenshots, and scrape content. Built on Playwright.

Navigate to https://example.com/login
Fill in the email field with test@example.com
Click the submit button
Take a screenshot

code-exec

Execute code in isolated environments. Supports running Python, JavaScript, shell scripts, and other languages with sandboxed output capture.

# Agent can run this directly and return the output
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv("data.csv")
print(df.describe())

Tip

Use the code-exec skill for data analysis, quick prototypes, or validating a snippet before committing it to a file.

http

Make HTTP requests to APIs, webhooks, and external services. Handles authentication headers, request bodies, and response parsing.

GET https://api.github.com/repos/myorg/myrepo/issues
POST https://hooks.slack.com/services/... { "text": "Deploy complete" }

notebook

Create and execute Jupyter notebooks interactively. Useful for data science workflows, exploratory analysis, and generating reproducible reports.

Create a notebook analyzing sales data from Q1
Add a cell that plots monthly revenue trends
Export to PDF

process-manager

Start, stop, monitor, and manage long-running processes. Keep services running, check their status, and restart them if they crash.

Start the dev server and keep it running
Monitor the worker process — restart if it dies
List all managed processes and their status

Custom Skills

Adding your own skill is straightforward: create a directory in your skills folder and add a SKILL.md file describing what it does.

skills/deploy-helper/SKILL.md

# Deploy Helper

This skill assists with deploying to our infrastructure.

## When to use
Use this skill when the user asks to deploy, release, or push to staging/production.

## Steps
1. Always run tests first: `npm test`
2. Build the project: `npm run build`
3. Use the deploy script: `./scripts/deploy.sh <environment>`
4. Verify health check: GET https://app.example.com/health

## Notes
- Never deploy to production on Fridays
- Always notify #deployments channel after a successful deploy

The agent will automatically pick up this skill when deployment-related requests come in.

Tip

Skills work best when they encode your team’s actual conventions — branch naming, deployment steps, code review checklists. Think of them as runbooks the agent can actually follow.

How Auto-Discovery Works

When processing a request, the agent:

1. Scans all available skills in the skills directory
2. Evaluates which skills are relevant to the current task
3. Incorporates relevant skill instructions into its context
4. Proceeds with the combined guidance

You can also reference a skill explicitly:

Using the deploy-helper skill, deploy the current branch to staging

Skill Directory Location

By default, Talon looks for skills in the skills/ directory relative to your config. You can point it at a custom path in your configuration:

skills_dir: /path/to/your/skills