Skills

Agent Skills are installable bundles of operational know-how that Joe loads from ~/.joe/skills/. You manage them with the joe skills subcommand. New installs land in quarantine unless your skills policy auto-approves them, so adding a skill and activating it are deliberately two steps.

The subcommand set

joe skills has these subcommands — there is no status subcommand:

joe skills install <repo-url> [--ref <branch|tag>] [--subdir <path>]
joe skills list
joe skills remove <skill-name> [--force]
joe skills update [<skill-name>]
joe skills approve <skill-name>
joe skills reject <skill-name>
joe skills reload

Install a skill

Install clones a git repository; you pass the repository URL as a positional argument, not a local path. Pin a branch or tag with --ref, and install a single skill out of a multi-skill repo with --subdir (a sparse checkout of that subdirectory):

joe skills install https://github.com/example/joe-sre-skills --ref v1 --subdir runbooks

A fresh install lands quarantined unless your policy auto-approves its source. The command tells you which state it landed in.

Approve or reject

Quarantine is a gate: a quarantined skill is on disk but not active. Promote it into the active registry, or discard it:

joe skills approve <skill-name>   # activate a quarantined skill
joe skills reject  <skill-name>   # delete a quarantined skill from disk

Auto-approval is governed by a policy file, ~/.joe/skills-policy.yaml. If the file is absent, the policy is deny-by-default — everything lands quarantined until you approve it by hand. (A malformed policy file is treated as fatal rather than silently trusting everything.)

List, update, remove

joe skills list                   # installed skills and their status (active / quarantined)
joe skills update [<skill-name>]  # fetch + reset every install, or just the one named
joe skills remove <skill-name> [--force]   # uninstall; --force if the install holds others

Refresh the running daemon

Installing, approving, or removing changes the filesystem. To make the running daemon rescan ~/.joe/skills/ without a restart:

joe skills reload

It reports how many skills were registered before and after, and what was added, removed, or updated.

Where to go next

• How skills feed Joe’s autonomy → The agent loop and autonomy