Skills
A skill is a playbook: a markdown document an agent reads when its description says the moment has come. An agent sees only the names and descriptions of its skills until one is relevant, then reads it whole. Six to eight per agent at most, so they do not crowd each other out of its context. Skills are the company’s own copies, installed at setup, and can be read, edited and forked in the workspace’s skill library.
Tandem’s skills
Section titled “Tandem’s skills”Written for Tandem; the method behind the team.
| Skill | What it teaches | Who carries it |
|---|---|---|
| plan-format | The one format for a plan or a specification: eleven sections in order, from title to next step; a week’s plan fits on two screens; nothing invented; revise rather than rewrite. See The plan format. | CEO, Product Lead |
| opening-sequence | The six steps a search-and-AI-visibility project goes through before any other work, each computed from the one before; how each is run; the rule while it runs: no later step is described while an earlier one is open. | Visibility Lead |
| site-health | How to read a site the way an assistant’s crawler does, in order: root files, home page, a sample by kind, speed; judge every page as the kind of page it is; what Google needs from the site and what an assistant needs from a page; how to say it. | Site Auditor |
| answers-visibility | How to measure where a brand stands in Google’s AI answers and in the assistants, per question and per assistant, with denominators; how to read a change since the last check; what gets a page into an answer. | Visibility Lead, Answers Analyst, Fact-checker |
| rivals | What a competitor actually is: evidence of who is compared with whom, judged, confirmed by you; where candidates come from in order of strength; you decide; how the kept rivals are measured. | Answers Analyst |
| the-niche | How every question the category asks becomes the list worth winning: relevance judged cheaply first, gap first, each row saying who is on the answer today and what the answer rests on; the agreement with you. | Answers Analyst, Writer |
| writing-standard | The shape every piece takes; quotable by an assistant; not a machine; pictures; where it goes; a brief for a developer. The scores a draft is checked against. | Visibility Lead, Writer, Fact-checker |
| queue-and-strategy | How work is ranked once the sequence is done: three lanes of proposals, your strategy mix, the recommendation computed from what was measured; choosing the next piece without handing the same articles over twice. | Visibility Lead |
| data-suppliers | How the analysts obtain search results, answers, page reads and speed measurements from the suppliers you configured, with the credentials in the workspace’s secrets, and what to do when one is missing. Internal to the team; you are never told which suppliers are used. | Site Auditor, Answers Analyst |
Engineering skills
Section titled “Engineering skills”From Jesse Vincent’s superpowers, MIT.
| Skill | What it teaches | Who carries it |
|---|---|---|
| test-driven-development | Write the test before the code, for any feature or fix. | Senior Coder |
| verification-before-completion | Run the verification and read its output before claiming anything is done, fixed or passing. Evidence before assertions. | Senior Coder |
| finishing-a-development-branch | When implementation is complete and tests pass, how to integrate the work. | Senior Coder |
| receiving-code-review | How to take review feedback: verify before implementing, no performative agreement. | Senior Coder |
| writing-plans | From a specification, a step-by-step implementation plan before touching code. | CTO |
Security skills
Section titled “Security skills”From Trail of Bits, CC BY-SA 4.0.
| Skill | What it teaches | Who carries it |
|---|---|---|
| sharp-edges | Error-prone APIs, dangerous configurations and footgun designs; secure by default. | Security Auditor |
| differential-review | A security-focused review of a change: blast radius, test coverage of the modified code, whether a change re-introduces a fixed bug. | QA, Security Auditor |
| fp-check | Verifying a suspected security bug to a TRUE or FALSE POSITIVE verdict with evidence. | Security Auditor |
| vulnerability-triage | Rating a verified finding by severity. | Security Auditor |
Bundled skills
Section titled “Bundled skills”From the workspace’s own catalog.
| Skill | What it teaches | Who carries it |
|---|---|---|
| github-pr-workflow | Branches, pull requests, review requests, the handoff. | CTO, Senior Coder |
| task-planning | Breaking work into child tasks with acceptance criteria. | CTO |
| qa-acceptance | Checking a piece against its acceptance criteria before approving. | QA |
The heartbeat procedure
Section titled “The heartbeat procedure”Every agent also carries the procedure it follows on every run: confirm who it is and what woke it; read its assignments; claim a task; read the task’s ancestors and thread; do the work; leave progress in comments, documents or work products; set a final status; exit. See Agents and heartbeats.
A skill is classified by what its files carry: markdown only, markdown with assets, or scripts. A skill with scripts cannot be imported from outside the catalog. Every skill above is markdown only.