What Is a Skill?

A skill is an automation that your agent can perform. It has three parts: a trigger (what activates it), logic (what it does), and a response (what it sends back). When you tell your agent "summarize my inbox" and it pulls your unread emails, runs them through an AI model, and sends you a bullet-point summary in Telegram — that is a skill.

Skills can be triggered in three ways. First, by a message — you send a command in Telegram and the agent recognizes it. Second, by a schedule — a cron job runs the skill at a specific time every day. Third, by an event — an external webhook or API call triggers the skill. Most beginners start with message-triggered skills and graduate to scheduled skills once they see the value of automations that run without being asked.

1. Trigger Defines when the skill activates. A message trigger matches keywords or patterns in incoming messages. A cron trigger fires on a schedule (e.g., every day at 7 AM). An event trigger responds to webhooks or API calls from external systems.
2. Logic The work the skill performs. This can include API calls (weather, email, calendar), database queries, file operations, AI model invocations, or any combination. The logic is written in JavaScript or TypeScript.
3. Response What the agent sends back after execution. This can be text, images, files, or structured data. The response goes back through the same channel that triggered the skill.

Here are examples of skills that people build in their first week. A daily weather briefing that runs at 6 AM and messages you the forecast. An inbox summary that pulls unread emails, categorizes them, and lists the ones that need a reply. A meeting prep skill that checks your calendar and generates briefings for upcoming calls. Each of these follows the same trigger-logic-response pattern.