Skills

A skill is a named bundle of instruction files: a SKILL.md at the top, plus any support files it refers to. Claude Code and Codex find skills in their own skills directories and load one when it applies. Mend keeps skills on the server and writes them into each session’s workspace, so an agent there has the same skills as the one on your machine.

Mend keeps two libraries:

• Your library belongs to your account. Like dotfiles, it follows you into every project. The web app calls these your global skills.
• A project’s library belongs to the project and applies to every session in it, whoever starts the session.

Push your local skills

The shared convention keeps skills under ~/.agents/skills/<name>/SKILL.md. Push that directory to your library:

mend skills push

Every subdirectory that holds a SKILL.md becomes one skill, named after the directory in lower case. The description comes from a single-line description: in the SKILL.md frontmatter. The push creates new skills, replaces same-named ones, and leaves unchanged ones alone, then reports the counts:

pushed 12 skills from /home/you/.agents/skills to your library · 2 new · 1 updated · 9 unchanged
sessions receive them from the next launch

Options:

mend skills push --dir ./skills          # scan another directory
mend skills push --prune                 # also remove skills the directory no longer has
mend skills push --project               # push into the current directory's project library
mend skills push --project api           # push into the library of the project named api

The scan skips hidden directories, .git, node_modules and __pycache__, and prints a line for each thing it leaves out: a directory without a SKILL.md, a binary file, a file over 512 KB, or a bundle with more than 64 files.

List a library with mend skills, or mend skills --project [p] for a project’s.

Manage skills in the web app

Skills in the web app’s navigation opens your library. New skill asks for a name, a description and the SKILL.md contents. Opening a skill lets you edit its description and files, add a file by its path in the bundle (for example references/notes.md), and remove the skill.

A project’s skills live on its Setup page, in the Skills section. The section lists your global skills and whether each one is Inherited, Overridden here by a project skill with the same name, or Off, then the project’s own skills with the same controls as your library.

Use global skills on that section decides whether sessions in the project receive the session owner’s library. It is on by default. Turned off, sessions in the project receive only the project’s skills.

Anyone who can see a project can read its skills. Changing them, or the Use global skills switch, takes an owner or the member who created the project.

What a session receives

When Mend creates a session’s workspace, it resolves the skills for that session:

1. The session owner’s library, when the project uses global skills.
2. The project’s library. A project skill replaces a global skill with the same name.

Mend writes the result into the workspace’s harness home, once for each harness that reads skills:

Harness	Directory in the workspace
Claude Code	~/.claude/skills/<name>/
Codex	~/.codex/skills/<name>/

In the workspace, ~/.claude and ~/.codex link into the harness home at /workspace/harness-home. Mend records which skill directories it wrote in /workspace/harness-home/.mend-managed-skills.json. On the next delivery it removes the skills it wrote before that the libraries no longer have, and leaves any skill directory the agent created itself alone.

This works the same in both storage modes. With the captured store, the default, Mend writes the skills into the running workspace after its harness home is in place. With a co-located store, it writes them into the session’s harness home on the server before the workspace starts.

Delivery happens when the workspace is created, so a new session, or a resume into a fresh workspace, gets the libraries as they are at that moment. A running session keeps the skills it started with. When a library changes, Mend rebuilds the project’s standby workspaces (see Hot sessions) so a claimed standby carries the new skills.

A launch never fails because of skills. If Mend cannot write them, the session starts without them and the server logs a warning.

Limits

Limit	Value
Skill name	Up to 64 characters: lowercase letters, digits, ., - and _, starting with a letter or digit
Description	Up to 1,024 characters
Files per skill	64, including SKILL.md
Size of one file	512 KB
Size of one skill	2 MB
Skills per library	200

Skills are text. File paths are relative to the bundle and may not start with / or contain ... One mend skills push request is also bounded by the server’s upload body budget, MEND_BUDGET_UPLOAD_BODY_BYTES (24 MB by default).