If your team wants every support summary formatted the same way, or every release note structured with the same sections, someone has to tell Dawn that every time — unless the instruction is captured somewhere the agent can reuse it.
That is what skills are for.
What a Skill Does
A skill is a reusable instruction package you assign to an agent. You write it in markdown with a frontmatter header that gives it a name, description, and tags. The body contains the actual instructions — step-by-step guidance, formatting rules, checklists, or whatever the agent needs to follow.
A skill can be short — “always use British English spelling and avoid jargon” — or structured: how to write a release note with a summary, breaking changes, migration steps, and a closing section. The agent applies the skill’s instructions whenever it is relevant to the conversation, so the team does not have to keep restating the same requirements.
Skills are created and managed in Dawn Web under the Skills section. Each skill has a slug (a URL-safe identifier like release-notes or code-review), and you can tag skills for organisation.
Where Skills Help Most
Document work. A general agent can answer a question, but producing a well-structured document is a higher bar. Dawn can already read and generate documents in common formats — PDFs, spreadsheets, slide decks. A skill that describes how your team writes internal summaries, or how release notes should be structured, means the agent produces that format every time. Not just when someone remembers to include the formatting instructions in the prompt.
Recurring reviews. If your team has a deployment readiness checklist, an escalation procedure, or a set of questions to ask before approving a change, a skill captures that. The agent follows the checklist without being reminded.
Tone and style. If different audiences need different communication styles — technical depth for engineering, plain language for product, customer-friendly tone for support — each style can be a separate skill assigned to the appropriate agent.
Global and Workspace Skills
Dawn supports two scopes.
Global skills are shared defaults available to all workspaces. These work for broadly useful behaviour — a standard writing style, a common formatting pattern, a general-purpose review checklist. Global skills are managed centrally and appear in every workspace unless explicitly excluded.
Workspace skills belong to one workspace. These are the right choice when the instructions are specific to how that team works. A product team’s release note format probably does not make sense for an operations team. A support workspace’s customer summary structure would be noise in an engineering workspace.
If a workspace needs to customise a global skill, it can create a workspace skill with the same slug. The workspace version takes priority for agents in that workspace without affecting anyone else. This means teams can override defaults cleanly instead of choosing between “accept the global version” and “duplicate everything.”
How Skills Reach an Agent
Skills are assigned to agents through the agent editor in Dawn Web. Each agent can have multiple skills assigned, and the assignment includes a priority that determines which skills take precedence when multiple skills are relevant.
Skills can also reference advisory tools — optional tool definitions that the skill makes available to the agent when the skill is active. This lets a skill not only instruct the agent on how to work, but also provide it with specific tools to use during that work.
Automatic, Manual, and Tool-Initiated Skills
Not every skill should activate the same way. Dawn supports three invocation policies:
Automatic skills are always active for the agents they are assigned to. If you want every conversation with the Support agent to follow your customer communication guidelines, make that skill automatic.
Manual skills activate only when someone explicitly requests them by typing #skill:slug in a message. This is useful for specialised procedures — a detailed audit checklist or a complex review workflow — that should only run when deliberately invoked.
Tool-initiated skills are triggered by the agent’s own tool usage rather than by the user. These are useful for skills that should activate in response to specific actions during a conversation.
Getting Started
Go to Skills in Dawn Web. Click New to create a workspace skill. Write your instructions in markdown:
---
name: Release Notes
description: Structure release notes with summary, changes, and migration steps.
---
When writing release notes, always include:
1. A one-paragraph summary of what changed and why
2. A list of notable changes grouped by category
3. Migration steps if any breaking changes are included
4. A closing section with links to documentationSet the invocation policy (automatic for most cases), assign it to one or more agents, and the agent starts using it in its next conversation.
Start with the instruction you find yourself repeating most. If you keep pasting the same formatting guidance, the same review checklist, or the same tone requirements, that is your first skill.
Once a Skill is in place, Dawn can help update or extend it from a conversation when the pattern evolves.