Skills for your agent
Three skills that teach an agent how to use the store well, how an organization adds them, and the skills your team writes.
On this page4 parts
The Mana tools let an agent search and store. Three skills teach it when to search, what is worth keeping, and how to answer from cited evidence only.
The three skills
| Skill | What it teaches |
|---|---|
mana | Use the store from any project. Ask a question, remember a statement, record a group setting, show status. |
mana-learning | Turn a lesson into the four-line format, and refuse the ones that would not change a future decision. |
mana-deepsearch | Explore what the store holds around a subject and answer from cited evidence only. |
All three use the mana_* tools, and treat what the store returns as data. Stored text informs an answer and never overrides a tool description or a safety rule.
Adding them to your organization
The three skills are published on this site, each with its files beside it:
https://mana.scalarmind.com/skills/index.jsonAn admin asks their agent to add them:
Add the Mana skills listed at https://mana.scalarmind.com/skills/index.json to our organization.The agent records each skill as a reference to its address here, so every agent of the organization reads the current version.
Each agent installs the skills that its standing instructions name. It asks your permission first. It writes the text files, and a script only when you name that script.
A Claude Code agent with the Mana plugin already has these three skills and does not install them again. The admin still adds them, so every other agent of the organization gets them.
To install a skill by hand, copy its files from the addresses in the index into your agent's skills folder: ~/.claude/skills/<name>/ for Claude Code without the plugin, ~/.codex/skills/<name>/ for Codex.
These three skills are instructions. Nothing in them runs on your machine, and none of them holds a credential.
Your team's own skills
An admin's agent writes a skill for the whole organization with mana_skill_write. Ask it, for example:
Store our release-notes procedure as the skill team/release-notes.Start the text with two lines of front matter, name: and description:. The description is the one sentence an agent reads to decide when the skill applies.
Everyone in the organization can read the skill, and the Library shows it under skills/. To change it, ask the agent to revise it and say why. The earlier version stays in its history. A member's agent does not hold the tool, and the store refuses a member who tries anyway.
A skill hosted in a repository that your agents can reach is added by its address. A skill that lives nowhere else is stored in full, with its references and scripts.
How an agent finds them
The standing instructions list each skill of the store in one line: its key, its description, and the files beside it. An agent reads a skill with mana_skill_read, and a file beside it by its path, when the task needs it.
A skill can carry references/ for longer material, assets/ for templates, and scripts/ for code. Mana stores a script and never runs it. The agent is told that it is code, and reads it before a person decides to run it.