Skills

Skills are reusable instruction sets that extend Vibe Code with new workflows, custom slash commands, and scoped tool sets. Vibe follows the Agent Skills specification, so skills you write here are portable to other agents that adopt the same spec.

A skill is a directory containing a SKILL.md file. The file starts with YAML frontmatter and continues with the skill instructions in Markdown.

---
name: code-review
description: Perform automated code reviews.
license: MIT
compatibility: Python 3.12+
user-invocable: true
allowed-tools:
  - read_file
  - grep
  - ask_user_question
---

# Code review skill

This skill helps analyze code quality and suggest improvements.

---
name: code-review
description: Perform automated code reviews.
license: MIT
compatibility: Python 3.12+
user-invocable: true
allowed-tools:
  - read_file
  - grep
  - ask_user_question
---

# Code review skill

This skill helps analyze code quality and suggest improvements.

Common frontmatter fields:

• name: used to invoke the skill.
• description: shown in the skill list.
• user-invocable: when true, exposes the skill as a slash command in the CLI and the VS Code extension.
• allowed-tools: restricts which tools the skill can call.

The CLI discovers skills from several locations, in order:

1. Custom paths defined in config.toml → skill_paths = ["/path/to/custom/skills"]
2. Project-level skills in ./.vibe/skills/ or ./.agents/skills/ when the working directory is trusted.
3. User-level skills in ~/.vibe/skills/.

Use patterns to control which skills load:

enabled_skills = ["code-review", "test-*"]
disabled_skills = ["experimental-*"]

enabled_skills = ["code-review", "test-*"]
disabled_skills = ["experimental-*"]

Skill filters support exact names, glob patterns, and regex with the re: prefix, just like tool filters. If enabled_skills is non-empty, it acts as an allow-list; otherwise every discovered skill is available minus those matched by disabled_skills.

Skills are the recommended way to add your own slash commands. Set user-invocable: true in the frontmatter and the skill name becomes available with /skill-name autocompletion in the CLI prompt, and in the VS Code extension slash picker too.

Pair custom skills with allowed-tools to keep their access scoped to what the workflow needs.

• Review a skill before enabling it if it can call write-capable tools.
• Prefer narrow allowed-tools lists over disabling tools elsewhere.
• Keep project-specific skills in ./.vibe/skills/ so collaborators can review them in code review.