Use skills

A skill is a piece of know-how written down once: how to run a discovery call, what goes into a product spec, how a follow-up email to a client should read. Ask the chat for one of those jobs and it does it the way the skill says, instead of making it up each time. You don’t have to write any of this yourself. Jinn ships a set of skills for the jobs most teams share, and they work from the first chat. Custom skills are for when your team does a job its own way, or does a job none of them covers.

The skills you already have

Open Skills in the left sidebar. Every workspace starts with fifteen skills marked Built-in: Nobody has to set them up or switch them on. Open one to read what it asks for — its steps, its rules and what a good result looks like — so you know what you’ll get before you use it. Nobody can change or delete a built-in skill, admins included. They’re the baseline every workspace can rely on. So the question is rarely how to get a skill working — it’s which job your team keeps explaining to the chat from scratch.

Use a skill in a chat

You don’t have to do anything. The chat knows every skill’s name and description, and when a question fits one it loads the skill before answering. Ask draft the follow-up for today’s call with the payment provider and it reaches for Meeting follow-up skill by itself. To make sure a particular skill is used, pick it yourself. Type / in the message box and choose from the list: your team’s own under Custom skills, the ones Jinn ships under Built-in skills. Hover over one to see what it’s for. Or open + in the message box and then Skills. Or click What Jinn can do in the message box, open the Skills tab and click the skill. The skill sits in your message as a chip, and Backspace removes it whole. A message can carry up to five. A skill you pick applies to that message only, so pick it again for a follow-up that needs it too.

Add a custom skill

When a built-in skill is close but your team does the job differently, or no skill covers it at all, write your own.

1. Open Skills and click New skill (+ at the top of the list). Jinn creates a skill called New skill and opens it straight away — there’s no form to fill in first.
2. Click the name in the window’s top bar and type the real one. Name it after the job, the way people will look for it when they type /: Client follow-up, not Sales process v2.
3. Fill in Description: what the skill is for and when to use it, in one line. The chat reads this to decide whether the skill fits a question, and it sees roughly the first 150 characters, so put what matters there.
4. Click Edit on the main text, write the instructions in plain markdown — the steps, the order, the rules, what a good result looks like — then click Done to see it formatted.
5. Click Save.

The bar shows Unsaved changes until you save. If you try to leave with words that aren’t saved, Jinn asks first — Keep writing or Discard — so nothing goes by accident. To give the skill an icon or an emoji, click Add icon beside its name. Without one it shows a lightning bolt. A built-in skill can’t be copied. If one is nearly right, open it beside your new skill and write yours along the same lines, changing what your team does differently.

Add files and folders

A skill can carry reference material besides its main text: a template, a checklist, examples of the real thing. Use Add file or Add folder from the ⋯ menu in the skill’s bar, or from its tree. A new file opens ready to type, and it needs a name before it can save. Keep each file to one thing — one template, one checklist, one example. The chat opens a file only when it needs it, by name, so a skill can carry a lot without slowing every answer down. Very long files are cut short when the chat reads them, and the chat is told so.

Create a skill from the chat

You can also describe the job to the chat and let Jinn write the skill. It drafts a name, an emoji icon, a description and the main text, and opens them in Skill preview, where you can edit anything and pick another icon. Nothing is created until you click Save, and asking the chat for a change gives you a new version of the draft.

Keep the list tidy

The tabs at the top of Skills keep the two kinds apart: All, Workspace for your team’s own, and Built-in. The list has search and sorting — Last updated, Newest first and By name. Share in a skill’s window copies its link, for pointing a colleague at it. A workspace holds up to 100 skills. At the limit, Jinn says so, and you’ll need to delete one to make room. To delete a custom skill, open More (⋯) on its row, or the ⋯ menu in its window, and choose Delete.

Skills and agents

A skill isn’t tied to an agent. Every chat can use every skill, including a chat with an agent in it. The two do different jobs: an agent’s Instructions say how it reads and thinks, and a skill holds how a job gets done and the material it needs.

Where to go next