Skills

What is a Skill?

A Skill is a named, reusable instruction set — conceptually close to Anthropic’s Agent Skills. Each Skill has three fields:

Field	Purpose	Limit
`name`	Short, descriptive title	1–200 characters
`summary`	What the Skill does and when to use it — this is the lightweight metadata shown in list results	Up to 2,000 characters
`instructions`	The full step-by-step body — only fetched when the Skill is actually opened	Up to 100,000 characters

Shanone itself never executes a Skill. The Skill Vendor is a storage-and-retrieval layer: your agent lists and reads Skills through MCP, then follows the instructions in its own context, calling shanone_execute_tool (or anything else it needs) along the way. This keeps Skills portable across whatever agent happens to be reading them — Cursor today, Claude Code tomorrow, on a different laptop next week.

Skills are stored server-side (Shanone’s Skill Vendor backend), not in a local file. Save one once and it’s available everywhere your account connects. They’re per-user, not shared across a team — see Permissions & Access Control for how access to Shanone as a whole is managed.

Why Skills exist

Stop repeating yourself

Give the same multi-step instructions once, save them, and reference them by name afterward

Portable across agents

A Skill created from Cursor is immediately readable from Claude Code, or any other MCP client on your account

Progressive disclosure

Listing Skills only returns lightweight metadata (name + summary) — full instructions are fetched only when a Skill is actually opened, keeping token usage low

Shared with the web dashboard

Skills you create via MCP also appear under Skills in the Shanone web UI, and vice versa

The Skill Vendor tools

Tool	Description
`shanone_list_skills`	List saved Skills (metadata only), optionally filtered by `query`, newest first
`shanone_get_skill`	Get a Skill’s full `instructions` by `skill_id`
`shanone_create_skill`	Save a new Skill (`name`, `description`, `body` all required)
`shanone_update_skill`	Update an existing Skill — only non-empty fields are changed
`shanone_delete_skill`	Permanently delete a Skill

query in shanone_list_skills is a simple, case-insensitive substring match against name and summary only — it doesn’t search inside instructions, and there’s no semantic/embedding search. Use short, exact keywords from the Skill’s title rather than a vague description.

If you’re integrating from outside MCP (e.g. a script or a backend service using an API key directly), the same functionality is available as a plain REST API under /api/v1/skills (POST/GET for listing and creating, GET/PUT/DELETE on /api/v1/skills/{skill_id} for a single Skill) — the MCP tools are a thin wrapper around it.

Recommended workflow

Check first

Before starting a non-trivial task, call shanone_list_skills (optionally with a query filter) to see if the workflow already exists.

Read it

If a match exists, call shanone_get_skill with its skill_id to get the full instructions.

Follow it

Your agent executes the steps itself in its own context — using shanone_search_tools / shanone_execute_tool for any integration actions the instructions call for.

Save new workflows

Once you’ve done something worth reusing, call shanone_create_skill so it’s available next time, from any agent.

Example

User: "Save this as a skill called 'Weekly Status Report'."

Agent calls shanone_create_skill with:
  name: "Weekly Status Report"
  description: "Gathers last week's closed GitHub issues and posts a summary to Slack #team."
  body: |
    1. Use shanone_execute_tool with github_list_issues to fetch issues closed in the last 7 days.
    2. Summarize them into 3-5 bullet points.
    3. Use shanone_execute_tool with slack_post_message to post the summary to #team.

A week later, from a different machine:

User: "Run my Weekly Status Report skill."

Agent calls shanone_list_skills, finds it, calls shanone_get_skill,
then follows the instructions — calling github_list_issues and slack_post_message itself.

Managing Skills from the dashboard

Everything you can do over MCP is also available under Skills in the Shanone web dashboard — useful for writing longer instructions by hand, or just reviewing what your agents have saved on your behalf.

Skills list in the Shanone dashboard, showing name, description, and creation date for several saved Skills

Opening a Skill (or clicking New Skill) gives you a name field, a description field, and a body editor with three tabs — Code for the raw Markdown, Preview for the rendered version, and Blame for change history (editing an existing Skill only):

Skill editor showing the Skill Name and Description fields, and the Code tab with Markdown instructions

New Skills start from a small Markdown template (## Overview / ## Procedure / ## Advice & Pointers / ## Forbidden actions) as a starting structure — you’re free to deviate from it.

Change history (Blame)

Every time a Skill’s body is updated, Shanone keeps a full snapshot of the previous version internally. The Blame tab turns that history into a line-by-line view, similar to git blame: each block of lines shows who last touched it and when, color-coded from grey (older) to orange (most recently changed).

Blame tab showing line-by-line authorship and timestamps for a Skill's instructions, with an older-to-newer color gradient

Blame is read-only. There’s currently no button to restore an older version from this view — if you need to revert a change, copy the relevant text back into the Code tab yourself.

Versioning

Every shanone_update_skill call increments the Skill’s version counter, and Shanone records the full previous snapshot (that’s what powers the Blame view above). There’s no user-facing rollback API, though — treat shanone_update_skill as a full replacement of whichever fields you pass, and keep your own copy of anything you might want to revert to outside of what Blame lets you inspect.

Deleting a Skill with shanone_delete_skill is permanent and cannot be undone.

Next steps

Tools Reference

Full parameters and example requests/responses for every Skill Vendor tool

Permissions & Access Control

Skills are per-user today — see how tool/service access is controlled per team member

Getting Started

How to Use Shanone

Product Guide

Release Notes

What is a Skill?

Why Skills exist

Stop repeating yourself

Portable across agents

Progressive disclosure

Shared with the web dashboard

The Skill Vendor tools

Recommended workflow

Example

Managing Skills from the dashboard

Change history (Blame)

Versioning

Next steps

Tools Reference

Permissions & Access Control

​What is a Skill?

​Why Skills exist

Stop repeating yourself

Portable across agents

Progressive disclosure

Shared with the web dashboard

​The Skill Vendor tools

​Recommended workflow

​Example

​Managing Skills from the dashboard

​Change history (Blame)

​Versioning

​Next steps

Tools Reference

Permissions & Access Control

What is a Skill?

Why Skills exist

The Skill Vendor tools

Recommended workflow

Example

Managing Skills from the dashboard

Change history (Blame)

Versioning

Next steps