Your First Skill - Vellum Docs

Skills are how your assistant learns to do new things. They’re like apps for your assistant — each one gives it a new capability.

Your assistant comes with 40+ built-in skills. But the best part? You can teach it new ones just by talking to it.

What's a skill?

A skill gives your assistant a new ability. Some examples:

The Weather skill lets it check forecasts for any location
The Gmail skill lets it read, write, and manage your email
The DoorDash skill lets it order food (yes, actual food, delivered to your actual door)
The Schedule skill lets it set up recurring tasks and reminders

You don't need to think about skills at all — your assistant picks the right one automatically when you ask it to do something. But knowing they exist helps you understand what's possible.

Built-in skills

Your assistant comes with 40+ skills covering communication, productivity, automation, development, media, and more. Most work instantly — just ask your assistant to do something and it loads the right skill behind the scenes.

A few skills (like Gmail, Slack, and Phone Calls) need a one-time setup. Your assistant will walk you through it when you first use them.

For a full list with documentation on each one, see the Skills Reference.

Installing community skills

Want something that's not built in? There's a growing library of community-made skills at skills.sh. Just ask:

"What skills can I install?"

"Search for a Notion skill."

Your assistant will find it, show you what it does, and install it with your permission. It works just like a built-in skill from that point on.

Building a custom skill

This is where it gets fun. You can create entirely new skills just by describing what you want in the chat. No coding required — your assistant handles everything.

Step 1: Describe what you want

Just tell your assistant what you need in plain English:

"Build me a skill that checks Hacker News every morning and sends me the top 10 stories."

"I want a skill that monitors a website for price changes and notifies me."

"Create a skill that summarizes my Slack messages from overnight every morning at 9 AM."

Be as specific or vague as you like. Your assistant will ask follow-up questions if it needs more detail.

Step 2: Your assistant builds it

Your assistant will:

Create the skill files — instructions, tools, and any scripts needed
Test everything in a sandbox to make sure it works
Show you what it built and explain how it works
Ask for your permission before saving it

The whole process usually takes under a minute. You can watch it happen in the chat in real time.

Step 3: Test it

Once the skill is saved, try it out:

"Run the Hacker News skill."

If something isn't right, just tell your assistant what to change. It can read its own skill files, debug issues, and update them on the fly.

Step 4: Make it yours

Your skill is saved as plain text files in ~/.vellum/workspace/skills/. You can:

Edit the files directly in any text editor
Ask your assistant to tweak it (“Make it run at 8 AM instead of 9”)
Add a schedule so it runs automatically
Share it with other Vellum users

What you can build

Custom skills can do pretty much anything. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Morning briefing — daily summary of weather, calendar, and top news at 8 AM
Price tracker — monitor a product page and notify you when the price drops
Meeting prep — automatically research attendees before your next calendar event
Social media digest — summarize what happened on your feeds overnight
Expense logger — track spending by telling your assistant what you bought
Content pipeline — draft blog posts based on your notes and publish on a schedule

If you can describe it, your assistant can probably build it.

Under the hood

For the technically curious: each skill is a folder with a few files:

SKILL.md — instructions and metadata (name, description, triggers, schedule)
TOOLS.json — tool definitions with parameter schemas (optional)
scripts/ — executable code in any language: bash, Python, Node.js, etc. (optional)

You never need to touch these files directly — your assistant manages them. But they're plain text, so you always can if you want to. For more technical details, see Skills & Tools in the Key Concepts section.

For documentation on every built-in skill, see the Skills Reference. Or keep going to Key Concepts to understand how it all fits together.