Skills

Skills are reusable prompt templates and commands that you install into your AI coding CLIs. They add slash commands, specialized behaviors, and domain-specific knowledge to your agent chat sessions — like plugins for your AI assistant.

For example, a "code review" skill might add a /review command that instructs the agent to follow a specific review checklist. A "testing" skill might add /test-spec that generates tests from a specification file. Skills encode best practices into repeatable, shareable commands.

How skills work

When you install a skill, Mate places it in the appropriate directory for each CLI:

Skills installed through Mate are symlinked across CLI directories, so a single skill works with all your agents without duplication. Install it once, use it everywhere.

Each skill is a markdown file that contains the prompt template and metadata the CLI uses to register it as a slash command.

Browsing the marketplace

Using skills in chat

Once installed, skills appear as slash commands in agent chat. Type / in the composer to see available commands. Select one to invoke the skill — the prompt template is sent to the agent, which follows its instructions.

Some skills are fire-and-forget (run a single task), while others are interactive (the agent asks follow-up questions based on the skill's template).

Skill structure

A skill is a markdown file with frontmatter metadata:

---
name: review-code
description: Review code changes with a structured checklist
---

Review the staged changes in this repository. For each file, check:
1. Are there any obvious bugs?
2. Is error handling adequate?
3. Are there any security concerns?

Provide your review as a structured list.

The CLI reads the frontmatter to register the slash command, and uses the body as the prompt template when invoked.

Managing installed skills

In the Skills section of Settings, you can see all installed skills and:

• Uninstall a skill to remove it from all CLI directories
• Update a skill if a newer version is available in the marketplace
• View details to see the full prompt template

Custom skills

You can create your own skills by placing markdown files directly in .mate/skills/ or the CLI-specific skill directories. Custom skills follow the same format as marketplace skills and appear alongside them in the slash command list.

This is useful for team-specific workflows — write a skill once, share the file, and everyone on the team gets the same commands.