Workspace skills

In addition to adding skills based on your dependencies, Symposium will also install skills your workspace defines for itself: skills found in skills/ or .agents/skills in the workspace root or any member crate install into the directory appropriate for your configured agent(s).

This allows your project to add skills in one central location that will work for all developers, regardless of which agent they use (for example, Claude Code users will have the skills synced to .claude/skills).

The default skill location therefore varies depending on the intended audience:

Workspace plugins

The workspace root and every member crate directory can define a workspace plugin: add a SYMPOSIUM.toml manifest (see the plugin definition), or just a bare skills/ directory — a directory with skills and no manifest counts as a plugin whose only content is those skills.

Workspace plugins are always active while you work in that workspace — no plugin source configuration or depends-on gate is needed. A skills/ directory in a member crate serves double duty: it installs for everyone working in the workspace and, once published, for projects that depend on the crate.

Every workspace plugin gets two default skill groups (unless disabled with [defaults] skills = false):

[[skills]]
source.path = "skills"

[[skills]]
predicates = ["workspace-member()"]
source.path = ".agents/skills"

The second group is how the .agents/skills convention works: it is gated by the workspace-member() predicate, so maintainer skills apply while working in the workspace but never install for dependents of a published crate. (The group can also be turned off globally with agents-syncing = false in the user config.)

Two details specific to workspace manifests:

• name may be omitted; it defaults to the directory name.

Components that should apply only to people developing the workspace (not to dependents of a published crate) can be gated with the workspace-member() predicate.

Informal skills

Workspace skills are your own notes, so the skill frontmatter requirements are relaxed: the name and description fields — and the frontmatter block itself — are optional. A SKILL.md that is just plain markdown works; its name defaults to the directory that contains it. Skills distributed through a registry or a published crate still require the full frontmatter.

Recommended git setup

We recommend you commit your .agents/skills or skills/ into the repository. Symposium installs a .gitignore file into every skill that it creates, so automatically copied and installed skills should not dirty your git status.

Pre-existing files

Symposium never touches skills in .claude/skills/, .kiro/skills/ etc. that it did not put there itself. If you previously hand-wrote a skill with the same name as one in .agents/skills/, your existing directory stays in place and the workspace skill installs under a suffixed name (<name>-<hash>) alongside it.