Skills

A skill is a set of instructions for a kind of task: a venue’s review rubric, how to write a methods section, a systematic-review checklist. The agent sees each skill’s name and description, and loads the full instructions when your request matches. You can also ask for one by name: “use the review-cbmi skill”.

Skills shape style and method. They can’t weaken verification, because that’s enforced in code.

Built-in skills

abstract ships with 38 skills:

• 8 review rubrics: review-neurips-icml-iclr, review-acl-emnlp, review-cvpr-iccv, review-cbmi, review-ictai, review-ieee-journals, review-nature-science, review-generic.
• 30 research and writing skills, including literature-review-chapter, systematic-review-prisma, related-work-section, abstract-writing, methods-section, discussion-limitations, rebuttal-response-letter, thesis-introduction, statistics-review, reproducibility-review-ml, search-strategy-systematic, data-extraction-matrix, medical-reporting-standards, figure-table-audit, camera-ready-checklist, and more.

Built-in skills are installed once. If you edit or delete one, it stays the way you left it.

The Skills screen

Open Skills in the sidebar to:

• turn a skill on or off,
• edit its description and instructions,
• delete it,
• approve skills the agent proposed (shown as pending),
• create one with + New skill: a kebab-case name, a description, and the instructions in Markdown.

You can also ask in chat (“make a skill for my lab’s writing style”), and the agent will interview you, then write it. Skills it creates on its own initiative wait for your approval.

Writing a skill by hand

Skills are Markdown files in ~/.abstract/skills/, shared by every workspace. Two layouts work:

• a single file: my-skill.md
• a folder: my-skill/SKILL.md, plus any reference files next to it (checklists, examples, templates; up to 30 files of 60 KB each), which the agent opens only when needed.

A skill starts with a small header:

---
name: lab-style
description: Our lab's house style for papers. Use when drafting or revising any manuscript.
---

# Lab style

- Use British spelling.
- Report effect sizes with 95% confidence intervals.
- …

• name: letters, digits, and dashes (defaults to the file name).
• description: when to use it. This is what the agent reads to decide, so make it specific.
• status (optional): active (default), pending, or disabled.

To keep skills somewhere else, set ABSTRACT_SKILLS_DIR.