Teach a workflow

A skill teaches a workflow: when to look up information, which tool to use, what to confirm and what to do next. The tools perform the operations; the skill explains how they fit together.

Teach the task, not a fixed dialogue. Someone may give all the details at once, add a correction or ask a question halfway through. A useful skill explains what must be known before an action and when to ask, without making the person work through a form one message at a time.

Skills live in agent/skills/<name>/SKILL.md. Flow uses the same source files in your messaging agent, standalone MCP server and generated plugin packages.

Write a skill

After adding the get_hours tool in Write a tool, create agent/skills/opening-hours/SKILL.md:

agent/skills/opening-hours/SKILL.md

---
name: opening-hours
description: Use when someone asks when the business opens, closes or can be visited.
---

Call get_hours for the current opening and closing time.

State the business time zone with the hours. If someone asks for the time in
their own zone and you do not know it, ask them which time zone to use.

The description is how an agent discovers the skill. Make it specific enough that the agent can decide to load it without reading the whole file.

Where the skill goes

Messaging agent

createAgent({ dir }) reads AGENTS.md and skills/ from the agent folder. The model sees skill descriptions and loads the full instructions when needed.

Set inlineSkills: true to include every skill in the prompt instead of loading them on demand.

Standalone MCP

mcpServer({ dir }) adds skill descriptions to the server’s instructions and exposes read_skill. An MCP host can read a skill when it needs the workflow.

The server and messaging agent can point at the same agent/ folder.

CLI

skill list shows skill names and descriptions, plus the generated <cli-name>-cli guide. skill get <name> [name...] reads only the selected instructions; --json returns named records. The CLI uses the standalone MCP endpoint and the same skill source files as the agent. See CLI skills for examples and exporting selected SKILL.md files.

Plugin

flow plugin copies the skills into the generated packages. Each package connects to /mcp/plugin, the tools-only endpoint, so the host receives each skill once.

Regenerate the packages when a skill or its assets change.

Keep instructions portable

Write about your product’s workflow and name its tools. Platform formatting and send tools are already handled by Flow for messaging.

A skill shipped through MCP or a plugin must use tools that endpoint actually exposes. flow check reports references to chat-only tools; plugin generation refuses them.

Check it worked

Restart the MCP server or messaging agent, then ask “When do you open?” In the playground, turn on Debug and look for the skill load and get_hours call. A model may skip a skill it already has enough information to answer without; the important result is that the hours come from the tool.

For a plugin, regenerate the output and run:

Terminal

npx @flow-engineer/flow check --plugin plugins

Agent instructions and coding-agent skills

These files have different readers:

Location	Reader	Purpose
agent/AGENTS.md	Your messaging agent	Its role, scope and behavior
agent/skills/	Your agent and MCP or plugin hosts	Product workflows
.claude/skills/	The coding agent building your project	How to use Flow Framework
Root AGENTS.md	The coding agent building your project	Project development instructions

flow new installs the coding-agent skills for you. Edit the files in agent/ to change how your product behaves, rather than the framework skills that explain how to build it.

Try your workflow in the playground

Switch people and channels, inspect tool calls and test sign-in.