Skills

Skills are plugins that add new capabilities, behaviors, or knowledge to Bolly. When a skill is activated, its instructions are injected into Bolly’s system prompt.

How skills work

Each skill is a SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter and Markdown instructions:

---
name: Example Skill
description: What this skill does
license: MIT
compatibility: claude-opus
metadata:
  tags: ["productivity", "coding"]
allowed-tools: "run_command,read_file,write_file"
---

# Instructions

When the user asks about X, follow these steps:
1. ...
2. ...

When activated, the Markdown body gets injected into Bolly’s system prompt — giving it new knowledge and behaviors.

Installing skills

Skills can be installed from GitHub repositories. The installation flow:

Bolly fetches the SKILL.md from the specified GitHub repo
Parses the frontmatter and instructions
Stores the skill config in ~/.bolly/instances/{slug}/skills/{id}.json

Managing skills

Bolly has three tools for skill management:

Tool	Description
`list_skills`	Show all installed skills with descriptions and status
`activate_skill`	Enable or disable a skill
`read_skill_reference`	Read bundled documentation from a skill

Skill resources

Skills can include additional files:

references/ — documentation and guides
scripts/ — automation scripts
assets/ — images, templates, data files

Bolly can read these via the read_skill_reference tool when it needs more context.

Per-instance skills

Skills are installed per instance. Different Bolly instances can have different skills enabled — a work-focused instance might have coding skills, while a personal one might have journaling skills.

Built-in skills

Bolly ships with selected built-in skills that are enabled by default. These can be toggled on or off per instance.

Core

Capabilities

Connections

How skills work

Installing skills

Managing skills

Skill resources

Per-instance skills

Built-in skills

​How skills work

​Installing skills

​Managing skills

​Skill resources

​Per-instance skills

​Built-in skills

How skills work

Installing skills

Managing skills

Skill resources

Per-instance skills

Built-in skills