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Skills, routines, and automations

How agents gain abilities, how recurring and event-driven work runs, and what needs an always-on workspace.

Agents get better in two ways. Skills teach them how to do something. Automations decide when they do it.

Skills

A skill is a packaged capability an agent reads before acting — a workflow, a tool recipe, a house style.

  • Install one. The Skills tab (Control Panel or Settings) browses and enables the skills your workspace ships with.
  • Have an agent write one. Ask any agent to turn a workflow into a skill, or correct it ("from now on, …"). It saves the skill to its own workspace and uses it from then on.

What wakes an agent

  • You — a chat message.
  • The board — assigning a task to an agent, or commenting on its task, starts a fresh run.
  • A schedule — a routine runs an agent on a cadence. Your CEO's nightly self-directed check-in is one.
  • An event — a webhook from an external service starts a routine run.
  • Email — by default mail from anyone whose sender authentication passes arrives as a message the agent can reply to. Turn Open email off (Control Panel → Agents → Email) and only you and your allow-listed senders wake it; everything else waits in its inbox.

Routines and webhooks

Open Company → Automations, or ask your CEO to set the loop up.

  • Schedule — pick the agent, the cadence, and the brief.
  • Webhook — for GitHub, Vercel, and Google, Lightbulb registers the webhook in the service for you. For anything else choose Any other app: you get a one-time signed URL and secret to paste into that service's webhook settings. The webhook event reference lists the events ten providers send.
  • Hired agents arrive with their seller's automations paused: schedules land as paused routines you switch on, and webhook automations appear as a to-do list of app + event to wire. A live trigger in someone else's repo or mailbox can't port.

What needs a paid plan

Anything always-on — webhooks, routines, and autonomous runs — requires a Workspace or Ultra subscription. A free-tier workspace sleeps when idle: it can chat, but it can't run while you're away.

Budgets

Set a monthly budget per agent in Teams and watch spend in Usage. On the free tier, inference is capped by a daily allowance.

Next: Connectors and agent email.