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Skills are reusable, persistent custom tools that live in your agent’s workspace. Once created, a skill is automatically available in every future session — giving your agent new capabilities tailored to your specific workflows.

What is a skill?

A skill is a set of instructions your agent follows when you invoke it by name. Each skill lives in its own folder within the workspace’s skills/ directory and is defined by a SKILL.md file. The SKILL.md file has two parts:
  • YAML frontmatter with the skill’s name and description
  • Markdown body with the instructions your agent follows when the skill is invoked
Skills can also include supporting files — helper scripts in a scripts/ directory, reference documents in references/, templates, or any other assets the skill needs.
Keep your SKILL.md files under 500 lines. Shorter, focused skills perform better than long, complex ones.

Auto-discovery

When your agent starts a new session, it scans the skills/ directory and loads every skill it finds. There is no registration step — drop a skill folder into the directory and it’s available. One important detail: skills created during a session are available in every future session, not the current one. The agent discovers skills at session start, so a newly created skill will be ready the next time you chat.

Invoking skills

Reference a skill by name in your conversation and the agent will run it. You can say things like “run the weekly-digest skill” or “use competitive-intel to analyze Notion.” The agent matches your request to the skill’s name and follows the instructions in the SKILL.md file. Skills execute within the same session context as your conversation, so they can reference previous messages, use data from earlier tool calls, and write results to the workspace.

Built-in skills

Dialog comes with a set of pre-built skills to get you started:
  • Feed creation — set up monitored Reddit feeds for specific topics
  • Scheduling — configure recurring research tasks
  • Trending topics — identify what’s gaining traction in target communities
  • Competitive intel — structured competitor analysis workflows
  • Pain point analysis — extract and categorize user complaints and frustrations
These built-in skills follow the same structure as custom skills, so you can read their SKILL.md files to learn how they work and use them as templates for your own.

Creating your own skills

You can create skills manually by adding folders to the skills/ directory, or use Dialog’s built-in skill creator to generate them through conversation. Describe what you want the skill to do, and your agent will scaffold the folder structure and SKILL.md file for you.
For a step-by-step walkthrough of creating your first skill, see the Creating Custom Skills guide.