Skills

A skill is a short guide for one kind of job: a folder with a SKILL.md (a name, a description that says when to use it, and the instructions), the open format Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode read. Kedalio keeps your skills on the server, so every run on every host gets the same ones.

The library

System → Skills lists your library. Each skill has:

• a scope: account (all of Kedalio) or project:<name> (one project);
• a state: on trial, active, or lapsed.

Every write to a skill is a revision, kept as history.

Trials, scopes and promotion

A squad that finds a way worth keeping may write a skill, but only as a trial, and only for its own project (skills.edit). A trial is given to that project’s runs, and lapses after 30 days without use (it stays as history).

Only you promote. In the library, Promote makes a trial (or a lapsed one) active where it is; on a project’s active skill it moves it up to your whole account, and the account’s skill shows where it came from. The project’s copy is kept as a revision. You can also write, edit and check skills yourself from Claude or ChatGPT with the connector (skills.edit for any scope and state, skills.check to validate a draft against the format).

The app promotes and reads; it does not edit a skill’s text. Nothing is installed by default.

What a run receives

A run gets the active skills of your account and of its project, plus that project’s trials; on a name both have, the narrower scope wins. It is capped at 40 skills and 2 MB. A project’s skills cost every run the tokens of their descriptions, so keep descriptions short and exact.

A leader may start a child with skills: [] to keep it narrow; the cascade’s router and verifier get only their own recipe’s skills.

Recipes

A recipe is a skill that names its companions (metadata.kedalio.recipe in its front matter): work.start with a recipe starts the skills together. Because it is a skill, you and your squads can write recipes as you write skills.

Retrospectives

After a squad that went badly, Kedalio reads what happened and proposes changes. A retrospective is made when a squad:

• failed after starting;
• went over its budget (cost or deadline);
• had a request denied by you;
• had its brief edited by you;
• had a verifier answer failed;
• or wrote a trial skill.

You can also ask for one on any squad, once (skills.retro). It is a short text-only run of a small model (Haiku, through a Claude Code login), so it costs little, and it answers at most three edits. Each edit says the target (one of the skills the run had, or the project’s rules), the exact passage it replaces, the new text and why. It changes a passage, not a whole text, so you read a difference.

A proposal reaches you as a notification, in Today → To decide, in System → My agent → Proposed changes, and in System → Skills → To approve. On its page you approve, edit the new text first, or drop. Approving applies it as a revision you can go back to; if the passage is no longer there, the proposal is marked out of date and does nothing. The agent’s own rules learn from your edited briefs separately (Your agent).

Evaluating a skill

skills.eval runs a skill’s cases (an evals.json next to it: a brief on a scratch repository, with objective checks) with and without the skill, as real runs on the model you pick, then judged; the result and its cost are kept with the skill. It is for you to run, from the connector.

The skills Kedalio ships

Seven skills are part of the product, read-only, and reached by name when your library has none of that name, so they work before you install anything:

Skill	What it is for
cascade	The recipe: a router picks the model, it works, a verifier checks, a failure climbs one step (Engines and costs).
cascade-router	The cascade’s first step: one label (haiku, sonnet, opus, fable) and one line of why.
cascade-verifier	Checks work against objective criteria and answers ok, doubtful or failed.
model-card	What each model is good at, its cost, and how to instruct it.
agent-routing	Which model takes which role when you start other agents.
account-pacing	Which engine account takes the next piece of work, by pace.
kedalio-product	Where things are done in the app and what your agent can and cannot do itself; every run of your agent gets it, installed or not.

Not built yet: a catalogue of skills from outside sources to install with one tap; the seven above are all Kedalio ships.