What problem does it solve?
Creating a new Agent Skill for a Hive agent requires following a strict specification: a SKILL.md file with valid YAML frontmatter, correct directory naming, proper scoping across five discovery roots, and progressive-disclosure structure. This Skill encodes all of those rules so agents author compliant skills without trial and error.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Specification Guidance: Defines the required SKILL.md frontmatter fields (name, description), naming constraints, and the optional scripts/, references/, and assets/ directory layout.
- Scope Selection: Explains the five skill discovery roots and when to use colony-scoped (write_skill tool), project-scoped, user-scoped, or framework-default placement to avoid cross-colony leakage.
- Authoring Best Practices: Provides rules for writing effective descriptions, structuring the body for agents, progressive disclosure tiers, and validation via the Hive CLI.
- Use Case: A user asks their Hive agent to create a new skill for interacting with an internal API. The agent follows this protocol to pick the right scope, write a compliant SKILL.md with a trigger-rich description, add helper scripts, and validate it with
hive skill validate.
Quick Start
Ask the agent to create a new Hive skill for your chosen API or workflow and have it scaffold and validate the SKILL.md following this protocol.
