Skills

Reusable, versioned workflow instructions for agents, managed by the Nexus platform.

Skills provide structured guidance for agents — from session initialization to security audits. They are loaded live from the Nexus backend at invocation time and exposed as slash commands in the agent runtime.

What is a skill?

A skill is a markdown-based workflow instruction assigned to a project. Each skill defines:

• A purpose — what the skill does
• A workflow — step-by-step instructions for the agent
• Rules — constraints and guardrails
• Validation — checks to verify the skill was executed correctly

Skills are versioned, searchable, and exposed to agents as slash commands (e.g. /nexus-init, /nexus-adr-draft). When an agent invokes a skill command, the skill body is loaded live from the Nexus backend — not from local files.

How skills work

1. Assignment — skills are assigned to projects in the Nexus dashboard or via MCP tools
2. Sync — nexus pull writes a local cache of skill files to .nexus/skills/ for reference
3. Invocation — the agent invokes a slash command (e.g. /nexus-sec-scan)
4. Loading — the skill body is fetched live from the backend via the MCP server
5. Execution — the agent follows the skill's instructions

Built-in skills

Skill	Command	Purpose
Init Nexus	/nexus-init	Initialize a session, load project context, sweep dispatches
Session Close	/nexus-session-close	Close the active session with a structured summary and next entry point
ADR Draft	/nexus-adr-draft	Draft an Architecture Decision Record with context, decision, consequences
Sync Memory	/nexus-sync-memory	Classify and persist session outputs to the knowledge base
Grill Me	/nexus-grill-me	Structured grilling session to stress-test a plan, design, or architecture before implementation
Deploy Check	/nexus-deploy-check	Pre-deployment verification: build, lint, type-check, test, environment validation
DB Migrate	/nexus-db-migrate	Generate and validate database migration scripts for Supabase/PostgreSQL
Code Review	/nexus-code-review	Structured code review with checklist-based analysis
Security Scan	/nexus-sec-scan	OWASP Top 10 security audit with structured findings report
Performance Scan	/nexus-perf-scan	Performance audit using Lighthouse (web) or profiling tools (CLI)
Learnings	/nexus-learnings	Capture surprises, unexpected findings, and gotchas as research notes
Dispatch Sweep	/nexus-dispatch-sweep	Process open Dispatches: prioritized inbox sweep and routing
Dispatch Create	/nexus-dispatch	Create a structured Dispatch for agent coordination
Show Plugins	/nexus-show-plugins	Display loaded Nexus plugins and connection status

Skill scope

• Core skills (project_id = NULL) are tenant-wide and available to all projects. Only platform owners and admins can create or modify them.
• Project-scoped skills belong to a single project and are managed by project admins. They do not appear in other projects unless explicitly promoted to core.

MCP tools

Tool	Description
sk_list	List skills for the current tenant
sk_get	Get full skill content by identifier
sk_create	Create a new skill in draft status
sk_update	Update skill content (increments version)
sk_activate	Change skill status (draft, active, archived)
sk_assign	Assign a skill to a project
sk_unassign	Remove a skill assignment from a project
sk_export	Export all skill assignments for a project