Factory skills

A skill gives an agent a repeatable procedure, such as a security review or incident runbook. Factory skills extend an agent’s instructions without requiring changes to its prompt.

Skill sources in a factory

A factory run can use skills from three sources:

• Role and integration skills - Default agents include GitHub skills for repository work. The foreman also includes a Slack skill. Choosing Linear or Jira during setup adds that tracker’s skill and instructions to the agents that use it. These skills come from roles and integrations, not files in your definition.
• Warp-provided skills - Bundled capabilities include oz-platform for cloud agents, factory-files for factory definitions, and factory-mcp for sending work through Factory MCP.
• Custom skills - Team-owned SKILL.md files in the factory definition, shared across the factory or scoped to one agent. They extend the built-in skills rather than replacing them.

For bundled skill IDs and how to attribute team-owned skill usage, see Skill actions in conversation data.

When to add a custom skill

Add a custom skill for procedures the built-in skills don’t cover. For example:

• Run required tests or lint checks.
• Follow incident-response or triage runbooks.
• Apply a security or compliance review checklist.
• Teach a custom agent its job. Custom agents have no built-in skills.

Skills don’t grant access to tools or repositories. Configure the agent’s secrets and MCP servers through its settings. See credential boundaries for access controls.

Add or edit a skill

Custom skills live in the factory’s definition, not its agent settings. You need permission to edit that definition.

1. Open the definition where it’s managed:

   • Warp-managed - In the web app sidebar, expand your factory and click Factory definition.
   • GitHub-backed - Open the connected definition repository. See Where the definition lives.

2. Create or open the skill file at the scope you need:

   • Every agent - skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md, for shared procedures such as repository conventions.
   • One agent - agents/<agent-name>/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md, for a role-specific procedure such as a security review.

   Replace <skill-name> with the skill’s directory name and <agent-name> with the agent’s directory name.

3. Write or update the skill’s instructions, name, and description. See Skill file format for frontmatter and Skill arguments for parameters.

4. Apply the change:

   • Warp-managed - Save the definition. Warp validates and commits it.
   • GitHub-backed - Open a pull request. The factory’s pull request checks validate the change, and merging to the production branch applies it.

For a shared skill and an agent-specific skill in one definition, see 02-sdlc-issue-to-pr in warp-factory-examples.

Skills and self-improvement

When a Scorer with Self-improvement enabled flags a recurring failure, the factory can update the responsible skill in a follow-up run. Changes arrive as pull requests for your team to review in the web app or your Git host.

Related pages

• About factory agents - Understand the agents that use factory skills
• Creating custom agents - Add specialized roles and skills
• Factory definition syntax - Look up definition files and fields
• Skills for agents - Write skills with arguments and supporting files
• Measure and improve a factory - Evaluate runs and propose improvements