Use and create skills

Extension on by default Required

Skills are reusable instruction bundles that teach Glean Tau how to do a specific task your way. Each skill has a name, a description, and the guidance Glean Tau follows, and it can point to the tools the task needs. Open Skills in the left sidebar to browse the skills available to Glean Tau, turn them on or off, create your own, and publish them to Glean.

Understand where skills come from

Glean Tau groups skills by where they come from, and the source decides what you can change.

Tab	What it lists	You can
All	Every skill available to Glean Tau	Browse and search all of them
On this computer	Local skills: built-in skills, skills you create, and skills from folders you link	View built-in skills. Turn your own skills on or off, edit them, and upload them to Glean.
Available anywhere	Skills hosted in your Glean account, by you or shared with you	Use a skill, open it in Glean, or turn it on or off across Glean

Built-in skills

Glean builds and ships required skills so they're always available to Glean Tau. Open one to read its instructions to see how Glean Tau approaches a task.

Each built-in skill belongs to the feature that provides it. A skill appears only when its feature is available to you, which means your list can differ from another Glean Tau user's list.

To change how Glean Tau does one of these tasks, create your own skill rather than editing the built-in one.

Decide when to use skills

Create or turn on a skill when you repeat a task that has its own steps, standards, or tools:

• A code-review checklist or pull request description format your team follows
• An incident runbook or triage process
• A report or document structure you reuse
• A workflow that always uses the same set of tools

When a skill is on, Glean Tau uses it automatically when it fits the request. You can also run one on demand from the composer's slash (/) menu.

Browse and create skills

Select More → Skills to browse everything available to Glean Tau. Switch between All, On this computer, and Available anywhere. Search by title, capability, or source, use Sort by to list skills Alphabetical or Recently created, and open any card for its details. A Built-in badge marks a skill that Glean ships with the app.

To create a skill:

1

Start a new skill

In Skills, select Add, then Create skill.

2

Describe what it should do

Describe the skill in the chat that opens. Glean Tau drafts the skill's instructions and any supporting files in ~/.glean/agent/skills/.

3

Check that it's on

When the chat finishes, return to Skills. The new skill is on. To turn it off, open the skill and turn off Available in Glean Tau.

To change a skill you created, open it and select Edit skill. Glean Tau starts a new chat that reads the skill's SKILL.md, asks what should change, and validates the result. It doesn't publish or share the skill without your approval.

To use skills that already live in a folder on your computer, select Add, then Link skills folder. Glean Tau uses the skills directly from that folder, without copying or changing them. To change or remove a linked folder, open one of its skills and select Manage linked folders. If you move or rename the folder, its skills show that Glean Tau can't find it. Select Relink folder to point to the new location.

Publish a skill to Glean

Skills you create start out as local, on the computer where you made them. To make them available beyond your machine, publish them to Glean:

• Select Upload to Glean on a local skill to review the upload. Under Files included, Glean Tau marks each file as Added, Modified, or Removed, and you can open the skill's SKILL.md to read the full definition. Confirm to create your own hosted copy. It appears under By you on the Available anywhere tab.
• Find skills teammates shared with you under Shared with you. Open a hosted skill and select Use skill to use it in a new chat, or Open in Glean.
• Hosted skills have a separate Enabled switch that turns the skill on or off across Glean, independent of your local copy. A draft hosted skill can't be used until you enable it in Glean.

note

Uploading isn't the same as sharing. To let colleagues use a hosted skill, share it through its access settings in Glean. Use Open in Glean to manage recipients and advanced settings there.

Import skills from other tools

To bring in skills from other tools, open Settings → Import and select Check under Look for other AI apps. Glean Tau scans for global skills from Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, shows each provider separately, and copies only the ones you select. It copies only global skills and never changes the source.

Limitations

• Changes apply to your next request. Turning a skill on or off rebuilds the current chat's setup. Start a new request after the change, or run /reload if a response is still streaming.
• Local skills stay on this computer. A skill you create or link is available only to you on this computer. It doesn't travel to another device until you publish it to Glean.

See also

• Automations — run saved workflows on a schedule or on demand
• Extensions — the full list of extensions and their default states