Skills

Admin (Cowork) → Skills

In Skills, admins create and distribute managed Cowork skills – sets of instructions that are automatically compiled into selected users’ Cowork plugin.

What Skills is used for

• Review all of the organization’s managed skills in one place

• Create new skills in three different ways

• Control who each skill is distributed to (all users, or specific people/groups)

• Enable or disable a skill without changing its content

Skills are compiled directly into each user’s Cowork plugin – a user only receives the enabled skills they have access to.

The skills list

The main Skills view lists every skill with these columns:

• Skill – name, a short description, and its technical identifier (slug)

• Status – Enabled or Disabled

• Access – who it’s distributed to (e.g. “All users” or “N assignments”)

• Version – version number (every save creates a new version, e.g. v1, v2…)

• Updated – last updated date and time

The list can be searched or filtered by status (the total count is shown, e.g. “All (12)”).

Creating a new skill

Clicking + New skill opens a choice of three ways to start:

• Generate a draft with AI (Recommended) – describe what the skill should do; AI writes instructions using the names and descriptions of every MCP tool available in this deployment. You review every field before saving. You can optionally attach example files or templates (up to 5 files, 50 MB) – AI inspects them and references useful assets in the draft. Use specific knowledge bases can also be enabled to add selected sources as retrieval recommendations

• Import Markdown – best for a skill already written elsewhere; every field is prefilled from an existing SKILL.md or .md file

• Start from scratch – three manual steps (below)

Here’s what Generate a draft with AI looks like in practice:

Step 1: Instructions

Write the instructions in Markdown – what Cowork should do. Type / while writing to reference a tool or a Dify workflow (both show up as MCP tools – see Dify & MCP), or a skill file, and click any reference to change or remove it. Skill files (up to 10 files, 50 MB) can be uploaded here and referenced from the instructions with /.

Step 2: Details

• Skill name – what users see in Cowork (also used for the skill’s directory name)

• Description – what the skill helps Cowork accomplish

• When to use – the requests and situations that should activate this skill

Generate with AI can fill these fields automatically based on the instructions already written.

Step 3: Distribution

Decide who the skill is distributed to:

• All users – every authenticated Cowork user

• Specific users and groups – only selected users or groups (searchable checklists under

  Users and Groups)

If nothing is selected, the app warns: “No users or groups are selected. The skill will not be distributed to anyone.”

Private can also be turned on — instructions and skill files then stay on the server and run through a private subagent; Cowork only sees the name and discovery text. Note: content distributed before enabling Private may remain in users’ existing copies.

Once all three steps are complete, the skill is created with Create skill.

Who can use Skills

Skills is only available to admins through the Admin (Cowork) panel. Regular users only receive the enabled skills assigned to them — creation and distribution controls aren’t available to them.

What to read next

• Limits

• Dify & MCP

• External connectors

• Configuration