Skills

Turn a captured session into a reusable skill — generate it from real work, version it, and share it with your team.

A skill is reusable instruction — a SKILL.md — distilled from real agent work and stored in paper console. When a teammate solves a hard problem well, you don’t have to rediscover how they did it: capture the session, turn it into a skill, and the prompt, tool order, and approach become something the whole team can reuse.

Skills are the step beyond reading session history. History tells you how the work happened; a skill turns the best of that work into something you can apply again.

How skills work

  1. Run an agent through the paper CLI so the session is captured to paper console.
  2. Generate a skill from a session that went well.
  3. Review and edit the draft — name, description, tags, and the SKILL.md content.
  4. Publish a version so teammates can find and reuse it.

Generate a skill from a session

Open a captured session in paper console and generate a skill from it. You can seed the draft with a short hint — a name, description, type, or tags — and the console extracts a first SKILL.md from the session’s prompts, tool calls, and turns.

Because the skill comes from a real run, it reflects what actually worked, not a best-guess written from memory.

Review, edit, and publish

A generated skill starts as a draft. Edit it to sharpen the result:

  • Name and description — what the skill does and when to reach for it.
  • Tags and type — so it’s easy to find later.
  • Visibility — keep it private or share it with your team.
  • Content — the SKILL.md itself.

Saving keeps it a draft. Publishing creates an immutable version with a changelog. Versions accumulate as v1, v2, and so on, and older versions stay browsable — useful when you want to see how a skill changed or compare against a previous cut.

Find and reuse skills

The Skills view in paper console is the shared library for your team:

  • Search by name or description.
  • Filter by scope — all skills, just yours, or your team’s.
  • Filter by tag and sort by most recent or most downloaded.
  • Open any skill to read its content, see the sessions it came from, and browse its version history.

To use a skill, download its SKILL.md and drop it into your project so your agent can pick it up.

Ways teams use skills

Capture institutional knowledgeWhen someone figures out a tricky workflow, it becomes a reusable skill instead of living in one person’s head.
Standardize how agents workPublish the prompt and tool patterns your team trusts, so everyone’s agent starts from the same proven approach.
Onboard with real workNew teammates pick up skills built from sessions that actually shipped, not stale best-practice docs.
Improve over timeVersioning means a skill gets better as your team learns, with a record of every change.

Frequently asked questions

Can I generate a skill from any session? +
Yes. Open any captured session in paper console and generate a skill from it, optionally seeding the name, description, type, and tags with a short hint.
How do versions work? +
Editing a skill saves a draft. Publishing creates an immutable version (v1, v2, …) with a changelog. Older versions stay browsable, so you can see how a skill evolved.
How do I use a skill in my own project? +
Open the skill in paper console and download its SKILL.md, then drop the file into your project so your agent can use it.
Who can see a skill? +
Each skill has a visibility setting and is attributed to its creator. Use the scope filter in the Skills view to browse all skills, just your own, or your team's.
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