Skills

Extract reusable workflows from your session history and sync them into your agent's skills directory. Turn proven patterns into repeatable commands your agent can invoke across projects.

Prerequisites

tapes CLI For generating and managing skills

PostgreSQL For stored conversation sessions

Vector Storage (optional) For semantic search when using --search flag

Subcommands

tapes skill generate Extract a skill from a session transcript via LLM

tapes skill list Show all generated skills

tapes skill sync Copy a skill into your agent's skills directory

Generating Skills

Generate from a session ID

Pass one or more session IDs (the UUIDs from /v1/sessions) to generate a skill from those conversations:

tapes skill generate 0196fdb1-93f4-7c41-a53d-0fbe2c5e1f23 --name debug-react-hooks

The transcript is built from each session's trace/span projection — turn-grain prompt/response pairs from the conversation spine, with harness shadow calls (permission checks, title-gen, injected context) excluded.

Generate from a semantic search

Find sessions by meaning and generate inline with the --search flag:

tapes skill generate --search "gum glow charm" --name charm-cli-patterns --since 2026-02-16

Use --search-top to control how many matching sessions are used. Requires vector storage. See the Search guide for setup.

Pipe search results into generate

Use tapes search --quiet for pipeable session-ID output:

tapes skill generate $(tapes search "charm CLI" -q -k 2) --name charm-cli-patterns

The -q flag outputs only session IDs, one per line. -k 2 limits results to the top 2 matches.

Date Filtering

Narrow conversation turns by date range with --since and --until:

tapes skill generate <session-id> --name morning-work \
  --since 2026-02-17 \
  --until 2026-02-17T17:00:00Z

--since Include turns from this date forward

--until Include turns up to this date

Preview Mode

Preview the generated skill without saving it:

tapes skill generate abc123 --name test-skill --preview

Useful for verifying the extracted patterns before committing to a skill file.

Listing Skills

View all generated skills:

tapes skill list

Syncing Skills

Copy a generated skill into your agent's skills directory:

# Agent-agnostic (default: .agents/skills/)
tapes skill sync charm-cli-patterns

# Claude Code (.claude/skills/)
tapes skill sync charm-cli-patterns --claude

# Preview without writing
tapes skill sync charm-cli-patterns --local --dry-run

--claude Sync to Claude Code's .claude/skills/ instead of .agents/skills/

--local Sync to the project-local directory instead of global (default is ~/.agents/skills/)

--dry-run Preview the sync target without writing files

Next Steps

See the CLI reference for the complete list of flags. For setting up semantic search used by --search, see the Search guide.