Skills

Lessons hold facts — "CoinGecko rate-limits at 50 req/min." Skills hold whole procedures — "how to summarize a CSV end-to-end." When you've watched Anton do something well and you want it done the same way next time, you save it as a skill.

Skills live in a single library at ~/.anton/skills/, one directory per skill, shared across all your projects. A skill saved while working in one workspace is available everywhere.

Creating a skill

Do a task, then save it. Anton drafts the procedure from the work it just did — the recent conversation plus the code it ran:

you> Take a quick look at sales_q3.csv

anton> [opens scratchpad, loads pandas, infers schema, prints describe(), plots distributions]
       Here's what I found...

you> /skill save csv summary
anton> Drafting a skill from recent work…
       Saved skill csv_summary → ~/.anton/skills/csv_summary/
       Name: CSV Summary
       When to use: User asks to explore, summarize, or describe a CSV file.

The name hint after /skill save is optional — Anton will pick a sensible label either way. The skill is saved automatically (no interactive editing step) and is available immediately, including for the rest of the current session.

Using a skill

You don't invoke skills manually. Every conversation includes a compact list of your saved skills — just each skill's label and a one-line "when to use" cue. When your request matches one, Anton recalls the full procedure from disk and follows it instead of reasoning from scratch.

Each recall bumps a usage counter, so /skill list shows you which skills actually earn their keep. Anton is also typo-tolerant here: if it asks for a label that doesn't quite exist, the closest match is used.

Managing skills

Command	What it does
/skill save <name hint>	Draft a new skill from recent work and save it (name hint optional)
/skill list	Show all saved skills with their "when to use" cues and recall counters
/skill show <label>	Print one skill's full procedure and stats — typo-tolerant, suggests the closest match
/skill remove <label>	Delete a skill from disk

What's inside a skill

Each skill is a small directory at ~/.anton/skills/ named by its label:

~/.anton/skills/csv_summary/
├── meta.json          name, description, when-to-use cue
├── declarative.md     the step-by-step procedure Anton follows
└── stats.json         usage counters

declarative.md is ordinary markdown — open it to read or hand-tune the procedure. The full directory format (including the optional later stages a skill can grow into) is covered in the developer guide at Skills internals.

When to save a skill

Good candidates are tasks that are multi-step, repeatable, and were just done well: a report you'll want monthly, a data-cleaning routine, a deployment checklist. Single facts belong in lessons instead — Anton handles those on its own.