---
title: "Custom Skills"
description: "Give the AI your team's domain knowledge, organization-wide, and choose which skills each project uses."
---

> Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.myspec.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Custom Skills

A **Custom Skill** is a piece of domain knowledge about your business, product
or industry: a glossary, a workflow, a compliance rule or a naming
convention. MySpec adds the skills a project includes to the AI's context, so
its questions and spec files use your terms and respect your rules.

Custom Skills work at two levels:

| Level | Where | Who |
|---|---|---|
| **Organization library** | **Organization settings** → **Custom Skills** | Owners and admins write, edit and delete skills. |
| **Project** | The project's **Settings** → **Custom skills** | Anyone with **Admin** on the project picks which library skills the project's sessions use. |

## What makes a good skill

A skill states what your team knows. It does not tell the AI how to behave.
MySpec checks every skill with AI before it saves it.

| Good to add | Will be rejected |
|---|---|
| Terminology, glossaries and naming conventions | Instructions telling the AI how to behave, or changing its role or persona |
| Workflows, processes, roles and lifecycle states | Asking for a different reply language, or to skip or change workflow steps |
| Regulatory, compliance and legal context | Anything with no domain knowledge: filler text, credentials or spam |
| API, architecture and data-model conventions | |
| Edge cases, gotchas and house rules | |

Short notes are fine, and a skill does not have to be in English.

## Add a skill to the library

1. **Open the library**

   Open the avatar menu, choose **Organization settings**, and find the
   **Custom Skills** card. Select **Add skill**.
2. **Describe the skill**

   - **Name**: shown when people pick skills for a project.
   - **Description**: one line explaining what the skill covers.
   - **Format**: **Markdown** opens a rich editor. **Plain text** keeps your
     text exactly as typed.
   - **Language**: the language the skill is written in: English, 日本語,
     简体中文 or Tiếng Việt. It does not change the language your sessions
     reply in.
3. **Write the content**

   Write what your team knows in **Content**. A counter under the field shows
   how many characters you have used out of the maximum.
4. **Save**

   Select **Save**. The button shows **Checking with AI…** while MySpec
   checks the skill, which can take a moment. When it passes, the skill
   appears in the library.

The card shows how many skills the library holds against its maximum. When
the library is full, **Add skill** is disabled until you delete one.

If you close the form with unsaved changes, MySpec asks whether to
**Discard** them or **Keep editing**.

### When the check fails

| Message | What to do |
|---|---|
| **This skill was not accepted** | The content reads as instructions, or has no domain knowledge. Rewrite it as facts about your domain, using the table above, and save again. |
| The AI check is temporarily unavailable | Your content is fine. Select **Save** again in a moment. |
| Too many attempts | Saving is rate limited. Wait a moment, then select **Save** again. |

## Edit or delete a skill

In the **Custom Skills** card on **Organization settings**, select **Edit**
next to a skill to change it. Edits go through the same AI check.

Select **Delete** to remove a skill. It is removed from every project that
includes it.

## Choose skills for a project

You need **Admin** on the project. Below Admin, the project's **Settings** menu
doesn't show **Custom skills**, but the skills the project includes are still
used in your sessions. See [Teams and project access](/guides/teams-and-project-access/).

1. **Open the project's settings**

   Open the project, select the **Settings** tab, then **Custom skills** in
   the menu on the left. It shows the project's **Custom Skills** card.
2. **Pick skills**

   Select **Select skills** and tick the skills this project should use. A
   project can include up to two skills.
3. **Choose Edit sessions too, if you want**

   A ticked skill is used in Generate sessions. Tick **Also in Edit
   sessions** under it to use it in Edit sessions as well. The skill then
   shows an **Edit too** badge.
4. **Save**

   Select **Done**.

If your organization has no skills yet, the picker says so. Ask an owner or
admin to add some under **Organization settings**.

## How sessions use skills

- A **Generate** session uses every skill the project includes.
- An **Edit** session uses only the skills marked **Also in Edit sessions**.
- A session reads the project's skills once, when it starts, and keeps them
  for its whole life. If someone edits a skill or changes the project's
  selection, the change applies to chats started afterwards.

## Recommended domain knowledge

MySpec also has its own catalog of industry skills, for sectors such as
banking, healthcare or logistics. These are separate from your Custom Skills.

In a Generate session, when the first stage (the interview, or exploring
your codebase) ends, MySpec may show a **Recommended domain knowledge** card
with skills that match the product you described. For each suggestion you can:

- Select **Preview** to read it.
- Select **Use this skill** to give the AI that industry context for the
  remaining stages.
- Select **Skip** to continue without one.

If no skill fits your product, the card does not appear.

Source: https://docs.myspec.dev/guides/custom-skills/index.mdx