What Are Skills

Skills are reusable knowledge packages that extend what an Agent can do. Each Skill contains:

• Approaches and operating instructions — Methods tailored to specific task types
• Best practices and conventions — Industry standards and internal guidelines to follow
• Optional scripts, tools, and reference resources — Practical utilities and materials that support execution

How to Use Skills

From discovering Skills to creating your own, the full workflow is:

1. Discover Skills — Browse official and recommended Skills in the Skills panel to find one that fits your scenario.
2. Install a Skill — Click ➕ to add it in one step.
3. Invoke a Skill — Type / in the chat input box and select Skills, or let Kimi Agent trigger the right Skill automatically based on your question.
4. Create your own Skill — If existing Skills do not meet your needs, upload a document or describe what you want in a conversation to generate a dedicated Skill. You can also create a custom Skill through a /skill-creator conversation.

How Do Skills Work?

At its core, a Skill is a folder with a fixed structure. It clearly describes the standard operating procedure (SOP), methodology, and reference templates needed to complete a task.

To keep conversations efficient, the Agent does not load the entire Skill all at once. Instead, it uses a “progressive disclosure” mechanism: during the conversation, it determines which Skills are relevant to the current task and loads only the information needed to complete it, avoiding context window overload.

Basic SKILL.md template:

Markdown

Skills vs. Asking Directly

Take writing a weekly report as an example. If you ask Kimi Agent directly, it will write in the format it understands. After you install a weekly report Skill, it will output the report every time using the structure, tone, and length you set, without needing repeated instructions.

Types of Skills

(1) Official & Recommended Skills

Official Skills: Created and maintained by Moonshot AI, available to all users, and automatically invoked by Kimi in relevant scenarios.

Common official Skills include:

• docx — Create and edit Word documents. Suitable for any .docx task, including document creation, editing, comments, revisions, footnotes, tables of contents, and Markdown-to-Word conversion.
• deep-research — Uses a tool suite for Deep Research and long-form report generation. It requires at least 10 iterative search cycles, recursive reflection, mandatory IPython visualizations, and specific paragraph logic.

Recommended Skills: Curated scenario-based Skills that can be added in one click, covering common use cases such as investment research and document formatting.

Common recommended Skills include:

• sop-writer — Turns business processes into complete standard operating procedure (SOP) documents, including flowcharts, RACI responsibility matrices, detailed operating steps, and exception handling.
• event-etf-study — Starting from a concept or event, identifies related stocks, builds a market-cap-weighted ETF index, analyzes market capitalization changes during the event window, and generates an interactive HTML dashboard. Use it when users ask about concept stocks, concept ETFs, event-driven analysis, or event studies.

Office Documents to Skills: Upload a document to generate a Skill and easily remix its theme style.

(2) Community Skills

Download or install suitable Skills from the open-source community, and use them with Local Agents such as Kimi Code or cloud Agents such as Kimi Claw.

Common AI Skill Hub Platforms

(3) Custom Skills

To create a custom Skill, simply describe in text how you want Kimi to work. You create it yourself for personal workflows and domain-specific tasks, such as:

• Applying specific style guidelines to documents or presentations
• Generating emails or communication content from a fixed template
• Organizing meeting minutes in a specific format
• Running a specific data analysis workflow