pAIring skills

A skill tells the model how to do one kind of task, such as summarizing a text, reviewing code, writing a cover letter or analyzing a threat report. You choose skills per chat, and their instructions join that chat’s system prompt, after its persona and rules.

Choosing skills for a chat

Click 🛠️ in the chat header, next to the persona 🎭 and rules 📏 icons. It shows how many skills the chat uses, and hovering it lists them.

• Search by name, description or category. Matching names come first.
• Tick the skills you want, then Save. Chosen skills show as chips, and × removes one.
• The list has the skills an admin enabled for everyone, plus your own (marked “yours”).

The model follows the skill that fits each request, so a chat can have several.

Before the first message

Like persona and rules, a chat’s skills can change only before its first message. They open the conversation, so changing them later would make the engine read the whole chat again. Choose them first, then start chatting.

Once a chat has messages, 🛠️ still opens, with a red warning, like the model picker’s, and the chat’s skills shown read-only. To use other skills, start a new chat.

In a channel, only admins and the channel’s managers choose skills, and only from the shared library. A member’s private skill would be hidden from the others.

The shared library (admins)

Admin settings → Skills holds the skills everyone can use, shown as cards, three in a row. Search them or filter by category.

• New skill writes one: name, category, a short description for the picker, and its instructions.
• Each skill has an Enabled box. A disabled skill disappears from the picker and stops applying in chats that use it, until you enable it again.
• Edit and Delete. Deleting a skill removes it from every chat that used it.

Template gallery

Below the library, the template gallery has 239 ready-made skills from Fabric by Daniel Miessler (MIT License), in categories such as Analysis, Extraction, Development, Writing, Security, Summaries, Visualization, AI and Learning.

• Search or pick a category, and Preview any template. An open preview spans the whole row.
• Add copies one into the library, enabled. Add all in a category adds a whole category at once.
• An added template shows Added. Your copy is yours to edit; the gallery itself never changes it.

The templates ship inside pAIring. Nothing is downloaded while it runs, so the gallery works offline or behind a firewall. A newer Fabric reaches the gallery only with a pAIring update.

Fabric’s patterns were written as single-task prompts. They work best when a message gives the input to work on, such as the text to summarize.

Your own skills

Settings → Skills (your own settings, not Admin settings) holds skills only you see. Create, edit and delete them there. They show in the picker of your own chats, marked “yours”, but not in channels.

The picker’s My skills link opens this page.

Skills and notes

Skills used to be a third kind of note. Now notes are for persona and rules only, and new accounts get two starter notes. When pAIring updates:

• an unedited Skill note is removed;
• a Skill note someone edited stays as a regular note, so nothing they wrote is lost. Copy its text into a skill under Settings → Skills to use it again.