Skills

Skills are reusable instruction sets that provide an agent with domain-specific knowledge and workflows. They are defined as SKILL.md files following the community SKILL.md format.

Skill Resolution

The skill field in an agent TOML is resolved in order:

1. Absolute path — used as-is (e.g. /home/user/skills/SKILL.md)
2. Relative to config dir — e.g. skills/code-review/SKILL.md resolves to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/axe/skills/code-review/SKILL.md
3. Bare name — e.g. code-review resolves to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/axe/skills/code-review/SKILL.md

Script Paths

Skills often reference helper scripts. Since run_command executes in the agent’s workdir (not the skill directory), script paths in SKILL.md must be absolute. Relative paths will fail because the scripts don’t exist in the agent’s working directory.

# Correct — absolute path
/home/user/.config/axe/skills/my-skill/scripts/fetch.sh <args>

# Wrong — relative path won't resolve from the agent's workdir
scripts/fetch.sh <args>

Directory Structure

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/axe/
├── config.toml
├── agents/
│   └── my-agent.toml
└── skills/
    └── my-skill/
        ├── SKILL.md
        └── scripts/
            └── fetch.sh