Skills System

Dynamic prompt enhancement via markdown files. Skills inject context-specific instructions when triggered by keywords in user messages.

Configuration

[skills]
dir = "skills"
enabled = true

Skill File Format

Skills are markdown files with YAML-like frontmatter, stored in the skills directory:

---
name: Code Review
description: Provides code review guidelines
triggers: review, code review, PR, pull request
---
When reviewing code, follow these guidelines:

1. Check for security vulnerabilities
2. Verify error handling
3. Assess readability and naming
4. Look for performance issues
5. Ensure tests are adequate

Frontmatter Fields

Hybrid Matching

Skill activation uses a two-stage process:

1. Pattern matching — whole-word, case-insensitive keyword search. If any trigger appears as a complete word in the user’s message, the skill is a candidate.
2. LLM confirmation — the fast model validates whether each candidate skill is actually relevant to the user’s intent. This prevents false activations from coincidental keyword matches.

The confirmation step is fail-open: if the LLM call fails or times out, all pattern-matched candidates are activated.

System Prompt Injection

When skills are loaded, the system prompt is enhanced with:

1. Available Skills — lists all skill names and descriptions
2. Active Skills — full body of each matched skill
3. Known Facts — stored facts (injected below skills)

## Available Skills
- Code Review: Provides code review guidelines
- DevOps: Infrastructure and deployment help

## Active Skill: Code Review
When reviewing code, follow these guidelines:
...

## Known Facts
### user
- name: David

Dynamic Skills

Beyond static filesystem skills, aidaemon supports runtime skill management through the manage_skills tool and optional registries.

manage_skills Tool Actions

Auto-Promotion

A background task runs every 12 hours, evaluating frequently-used procedures for automatic promotion into reusable skills.