Skills

Skills are reusable, self-contained packages of instructions that extend what DinoAI knows how to do. DinoAI auto-discovers the skills in your repository and loads them on demand — only pulling a skill’s full instructions into context when it’s relevant to the task, so your context stays lean. DinoAI is compatible with the standard agent skills format, so skills you already maintain (alongside CLAUDE.md / AGENT.md) work without changes.

How skills are structured

A skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file. DinoAI discovers skills from any of these locations in your repository (checked in this order):

.claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md
.dino/skills/<name>/SKILL.md
skills/<name>/SKILL.md
SKILL.md (repository root)

your-repository
├── .claude/
│   └── skills/
│       ├── incident-healer/
│       │   ├── SKILL.md
│       │   └── runbook.md        # optional supporting files
│       └── dbt-style-guide/
│           └── SKILL.md
├── dbt_project/
└── README.md

Each SKILL.md has YAML frontmatter with a required name and description, followed by the instructions the skill provides:

.claude/skills/incident-healer/SKILL.md

---
name: incident-healer
description: Heal failed dbt™ runs by diagnosing the error and opening a fix PR
---

When a Bolt run fails:

1. Read the run logs to identify the failing model and the underlying error.
2. Reproduce locally, apply the minimal fix, and run the affected models.
3. Open a pull request describing the root cause and the fix.

The description is how DinoAI decides when a skill is relevant, so keep it specific. Skill names must be unique — if two skills share a name, the first one discovered wins. Any additional files in the skill folder (runbooks, templates, scripts) become available to DinoAI once the skill is loaded.

How skills load per surface

In Copilot

Skills are discovered and loaded automatically. There’s nothing to configure — relevant skills are surfaced as you work.

In the agents

Skills are discovered automatically, but a Programmable / Slack / Bolt agent can only load them if its allowlist includes the load_skill_instructions tool.

Enabling skills for a Programmable Agent. Add load_skill_instructions to the agent’s tools.list. See the Tools Reference for the id and YAML Configuration for allowlist syntax.

tools:
  mode: allowlist
  list:
    - load_skill_instructions
    # ... your other tools

Slack Bot Agent

Programmable Agent

Bolt Pipeline Agent

Copilot

MCP Server

Context & Customization

DinoAI Tools

Settings & Credits

How skills are structured

How skills load per surface

In Copilot

In the agents

​How skills are structured

​How skills load per surface

In Copilot

In the agents

How skills are structured

How skills load per surface