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What is a Skill?

A Skill packages your team’s method for a repeatable deliverable — call prep, discovery scripts, battlecards, one-pagers, QBR decks — as instructions an AI assistant can load and follow. Skills use the Anthropic Agent Skills format: a root SKILL.md with the instructions, plus optional bundled reference files the instructions point to. The difference from a prompt in a doc somewhere: Skills live in Octave, so every assistant connected to your workspace — Claude, Cursor, or anything else speaking MCP — discovers the same skills, follows the same current version, and your team’s method improves in one place.

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Progressive disclosure

Skills load in three levels, so assistants read only what the task needs:
  1. Discovery — find_skill matches a task description against skill names and descriptions; list_skills browses the catalog. Neither loads any instructions.
  2. Instructions — get_skill loads the SKILL.md body plus a listing of bundled files.
  3. Reference files — get_skill_file reads one bundled file, only when the instructions call for it.
This keeps context lean: an assistant prepping a call loads the call-prep skill, not your entire methodology.

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Skill lifecycle

Skills have a draft → published lifecycle and can be deactivated. Draft and deactivated skills stay invisible to assistants — find_skill and the listing surface only published, active skills — so you can iterate on a method without agents following a half-finished version. Each skill’s folder is stored as a managed Asset (type skill). The Skill API keeps the searchable registry and the stored files in sync, which is why skill files are edited through the Skill API rather than the generic asset surface.

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Managing Skills via API

  • GET /api/v2/skill/list — list skills, with status and text filters
  • GET /api/v2/skill/get — load a skill by oId or exact name, including its SKILL.md body and file listing
  • GET /api/v2/skill/file — read one bundled file
  • POST /api/v2/skill/find — find the best-matching skill for a task description
  • POST /api/v2/skill/create / POST /api/v2/skill/update / POST /api/v2/skill/delete — manage skills
The same operations are available to assistants through the MCP skill tools.