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Skills are plugins that add new capabilities, behaviors, or knowledge to Bolly. When a skill is activated, its instructions are injected into Bolly’s system prompt.

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How skills work

Each skill is a SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter and Markdown instructions: 
---
name: Example Skill
description: What this skill does
license: MIT
compatibility: claude-opus
metadata:
  tags: ["productivity", "coding"]
allowed-tools: "run_command,read_file,write_file"
---

# Instructions

When the user asks about X, follow these steps:
1. ...
2. ...
When activated, the Markdown body gets injected into Bolly’s system prompt — giving it new knowledge and behaviors.

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Installing skills

Skills can be installed from GitHub repositories. The installation flow:
  1. Bolly fetches the SKILL.md from the specified GitHub repo
  2. Parses the frontmatter and instructions
  3. Stores the skill config in ~/.bolly/instances/{slug}/skills/{id}.json

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Managing skills

Bolly has three tools for skill management:
ToolDescription
list_skillsShow all installed skills with descriptions and status
activate_skillEnable or disable a skill
read_skill_referenceRead bundled documentation from a skill

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Skill resources

Skills can include additional files:
  • references/ — documentation and guides
  • scripts/ — automation scripts
  • assets/ — images, templates, data files
Bolly can read these via the read_skill_reference tool when it needs more context.

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Per-instance skills

Skills are installed per instance. Different Bolly instances can have different skills enabled — a work-focused instance might have coding skills, while a personal one might have journaling skills.

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Built-in skills

Bolly ships with selected built-in skills that are enabled by default. These can be toggled on or off per instance.