Skills

When Scout writes a Pinterest pin, designs a book cover, or scores a video title, it is not improvising from a general prompt. It is running a skill: a written method for that one job, refined over time, that any brand agent can pick up. Skills are the unit of mastery in WilsonOS. Flows are the unit of orchestration — a flow is a recipe that sequences skills.

What a skill is

A skill is a folder with an instruction document the agent reads just before performing the task, optional reference material, and optional deterministic tools (scripts) it may call. The document tells the agent what good looks like and how to get there; the tools do execution the agent should not improvise, like calling an image generator or a publishing platform.

Three properties matter:

• Atomic. One skill, one job. Write a hook. Render a brand book. Extract customer phrases from reviews. A skill that does five things is five skills wearing a coat.
• Brand-agnostic. The same skill serves every brand. It loads the brand stack at run time, which is why one improvement lifts every brand’s output.
• Declares what it needs up front. Its first step names exactly the context to load — this brand’s customer language, that reference document — so nothing loads “just in case”, and each piece of context loads once per task.

The catalogue

Skills live in one flat catalogue, indexed by category (brand and identity, ads and paid media, book publishing, video production, business strategy, and so on), by the job they do, and by status. A few hundred exist. An agent is expected to check the catalogue before improvising — and to say which skill it chose (promise 2 of the Five). If nothing fits, the right move is to say so and ask, not to roll a one-off.

The catalogue is also the place a skill is seen: open one and you find every artifact it produced, the rating each received, its cost, and its rating trend. That view is only as good as the attribution behind it.

Attribution: the recipe is rated per dish

The skill is the recipe. A rating is feedback on the recipe, collected per dish. So the load-bearing link is skill → artifact, not skill → task: a task that ran nine skills and scored “3” teaches nothing, while “this thumbnail is weak” attributed to the thumbnail skill is an improvement signal.

flowchart LR
  T[Task] -->|chose| S[Skill]
  S -->|ran| R[Run]
  R -->|produced| A[Artifact]
  A -->|rated| V[Review]
  V -.->|rolls up| S

Two records look similar and are kept apart: the plan (which skills the agent considered and chose for a task, and why) and the fact (which skill actually made this file). Ratings ride the fact, never the plan — you can choose a skill that produces nothing.

Guardrails inside a skill

A skill that spends money carries the cost gate itself, not only the flow that calls it: quote the model, size, quantity, and expected cost; ask; stop and wait for an explicit go-ahead; and re-quote for every further run — approval for run one does not cover run two. A skill that generates media calls the one media gateway, never a provider directly, so every render has a receipt, a cost, and a skill attached.

Where skills come from, and how they improve

Brand agents create and refine the skills they use; a skill can also be imported from an external kit, in which case it is brought up to the house standard on the way in. Improvement follows the improvement contract: a change is a proposal with evidence, tested against the current version, promoted deliberately, with the previous version and the reasoning kept. The catalogue tightens as well as grows — skills that are never chosen are retired, duplicates merged, flagged gaps filled.

Skills are mastery; flows are orchestration

If you are deciding whether something is a skill or a flow: a skill answers “how do I do this one thing well?”; a flow answers “what sequence of things gets this outcome?” A skill’s setup declares what that step needs; a flow’s setup declares what is needed across the whole arc, and the skills it calls inherit it.

live The catalogue, brand-agnostic loading, the cost gate, the media gateway rule, and the attribution fields are live. direction Attribution fill rates are measured nightly and still climbing; the skill-mastery view is live and fills as writers record the fields.

Related

FlowsHow skills are sequenced into an outcome.

Media generationThe one door every image, video, and audio render goes through.

The improvement contractHow a skill gets better without being rewritten on instinct.

Your brandsThe context that makes one skill produce different work per brand.