Agents and skills

Agents and skills let you add reusable instruction layers without copying the same guidance into every workflow.

Workflow agent and skills fields are portable ctrlyoke prompt attachments. CliPromptPreparer.createCategorizedPromptFiles() resolves their content into categorized prompt references; agent content is wrapped in <agentInstructions> tags before the reference is supplied to the harness. These fields are supported independently of any harness-native discovery feature.

Agent

agent selects one custom agent by name.

agent: ctrlyoke-workflow-composer

The schema expects the bare name, not a file path or extension.

Skills

skills attaches a list of skill names:

skills:
  - code-review
  - refactor-helper

Prompt-level skills replace workflow-level skills rather than merging with them.

Agents & Skills settings

The Agents & Skills settings page manages a separate, optional path: copying agent and skill files into harness-native discovery directories. Native discovery can enable ambient skills or native subagent spawning, and its behavior varies by harness. It does not determine whether workflow agent or skills attachments are supported.

Disabling inherited values

Use null when you want to stop inheritance from the workflow level:

steps:
  - prompt: Run without the default agent.
    agent: null

When to use them

• use an agent for a stable persona or role
• use skills for smaller reusable instruction packs
• keep workflow prompts focused on the task rather than repeating general process guidance