Procedural Skills (skills.md)
How to define procedural domain rules and behavioral instructions for your AI agents using plain Markdown.
In Liate, skills are human-readable, domain-specific procedural rules written in standard Markdown (skills.md). Instead of cluttering Python prompt templates or burying rules inside code, you write clean instructions in a dedicated file and link it in your agent's A-Pillar:
{
"A": {
"name": "time-agent",
"intent": "You are a time analyst.",
"skills": "./skills.md"
}
}When Liate initializes an agent, it reads skills.md, parses the rules, and injects them as a dedicated [PROCEDURAL SKILL] block into the system prompt.
Example skills.md
Here is an example of procedural rules for an Indian Time & Greeting agent:
# time-agent procedural skills
### 1. Timezone Handling:
- When the user asks for time in India or IST, ALWAYS pass `timezone="Asia/Kolkata"` to `get_current_time`.
- When asked for other countries, map the country/city to standard IANA timezone identifiers (e.g., `America/New_York`, `Europe/London`).
### 2. Real-Time Greetings:
- Inspect the returned hour in 24-hour format:
- `05:00 - 11:59` ➔ "Good Morning! ☀️"
- `12:00 - 16:59` ➔ "Good Afternoon! 🌤️"
- `17:00 - 20:59` ➔ "Good Evening! 🌆"
- `21:00 - 04:59` ➔ "Good Night! 🌙"
### 3. Daily Quotes:
- Accompany every time response with an inspirational quote about time, wisdom, or perseverance.
- End your response with a peaceful greeting (e.g., "Have a wonderful day ahead! 🕉️").How Liate Executes skills.md
Liate resolves skills through a 3-tier lookup mechanism:
1. Relative Path Lookup:
"./skills.md" ➔ Resolved relative to the agent's folder.
2. Global Store Lookup:
"researcher" ➔ Resolved from ~/.liate/skills/researcher.md.
3. Multiple Skills Chaining:
"skills": "./rules.md, ./compliance.md, formatting"
➔ Injects multiple skill blocks sequentially into the LLM system prompt.Sovereign Supabase Integration (BYOD)
When running in the Liate Sovereign Cloud, skills.md is stored directly in your private Supabase PostgreSQL database:
- Table Column:
skills_md TEXTinliate_agentstable for full-text visual editing in Supabase dashboard. - Embedded JSONB:
spec.A.skills_contentembeds the Markdown text, keeping the agent 100% self-contained in 1 database row.