Skills
Reusable instruction packs that teach the coding agent your conventions — set up and fine-tuned before you rely on them.
Overview
A skill is a reusable markdown instruction pack for the coding agent. Where notes and invariants shape how Cygent audits, skills shape how Cygent Code writes and fixes code — your test conventions, your preferred patterns, the framework idioms your team expects in every PR.
Skills are not used during audits. They never influence findings. They're loaded only by the coding agent when it writes or fixes code. If you want to shape audit behavior, use notes and invariants instead.
What a skill looks like
A skill is a kebab-case name plus a markdown body of instructions:
| Field | Rules |
|---|---|
| Name | Kebab-case, e.g. foundry-test-conventions |
| Description | A short line on when the skill applies |
| Content | Markdown instructions — the actual guidance the coding agent follows |
Good skills are specific and actionable. Some examples worth encoding:
foundry-test-conventions— "Tests live intest/, named<Contract>.t.sol. Usevm.prankfor caller context. Always test the revert path withvm.expectRevert."no-magic-numbers— "Extract literal time/threshold values into namedconstants with a comment explaining the source of the value."storage-layout-safety— "Never reorder or remove existing storage variables in upgradeable contracts. Append new ones at the end."
Creating a skill
Open the Knowledge tab → Coding Skills
On the instance dashboard, go to Knowledge → Coding Skills.
Name it and write the instructions
Use a clear kebab-case name and write the body as if briefing a teammate on the convention.
Choose the scope and save
Project loads the skill only in that repo's coding sessions; Global loads it in every coding session across the instance. A project skill with the same name as a global one overrides it for that repo.
Skills take effect on the next coding session — there's no restart and no audit dependency. The coding agent picks up your skills the next time it's asked to write or fix code.
Best practice: set up and fine-tune before you rely on a skill
This is the single most important habit with skills. A skill is only as good as its instructions, and instructions that read well to a human don't always produce the output you want. Don't add a skill and assume it's working — prove it.
Write the first version
Draft the skill with the convention you want enforced.
Test it on a real, low-stakes coding task
Ask Cygent Code to make a small change in a repo where the skill is active. A throwaway branch or a trivial fix is ideal.
Read the resulting PR critically
Did the agent actually follow the skill? Where did it drift? Often the instruction was ambiguous, or it assumed context the agent doesn't have.
Refine the skill and repeat
Tighten the wording, add an example, remove ambiguity. Re-run on another small task. Iterate until the output is what you'd accept from a teammate — then let it run on real work.
A skill that's never been tested is a guess. The minutes you spend fine-tuning it on a throwaway task pay back every time the coding agent touches that repo afterward.
Built-in (baked) skills
Cygent ships with built-in coding skills covering common smart-contract tooling and conventions — these are active by default and require no setup. If they conflict with your team's preferences, you can disable all built-in skills instance-wide with a single toggle in the Coding Skills tab. The change applies on the next coding session.
The built-in-skills toggle is an instance-wide, all-or-nothing switch, and it's owner-gated. Disabling it turns off every baked skill at once; your own custom skills are unaffected.
Recommendations
Cygent recommends skills too — most usefully from stack detection. When it detects the build tools in a repo (a foundry.toml, a Hardhat config, a Cargo workspace), it can propose a matching conventions skill in the Recommendations banner. Accept to review and edit it prefilled before saving; Dismiss to drop it. Treat an accepted recommendation like any other new skill — fine-tune it before you depend on it.