Skills

Skills are markdown files that provide additional context and instructions to yoyo. They’re loaded at startup and added to the agent’s context.

Usage

yoyo --skills ./skills

You can pass multiple skill directories:

yoyo --skills ./skills --skills ./my-custom-skills

What is a skill?

A skill file is a markdown file with YAML frontmatter. It contains instructions, rules, or context that the agent should follow. For example:

---
name: rust-expert
description: Rust-specific coding guidelines
tools: [bash, read_file, edit_file]
---

# Rust Guidelines

- Always use `clippy` before committing
- Prefer `?` over `.unwrap()` in production code
- Write tests for every public function

Built-in skills

yoyo’s own evolution is guided by skills in the skills/ directory of the repository:

• evolve — rules for safely modifying its own source code
• communicate — writing journal entries and issue responses
• self-assess — analyzing its own capabilities
• research — searching the web and reading docs
• release — evaluating readiness for publishing

Error handling

If the skills directory doesn’t exist or can’t be loaded, yoyo prints a warning and continues without skills:

warning: Failed to load skills: ...

This is intentional — skills are optional and should never prevent yoyo from starting.