Make skills available to your agents
Everyone · Build the agent team
Steps at a glance
1. Check where your skills are currently installed
This is the whole task in one sentence: skills must be installed globally on the machine running the harness, not scoped to a single project. A project-scoped skill is invisible to a Buzz agent, and the failure is silent — the agent does not say "I lack that skill", it simply works without it.
This matters directly: your team's specialised skills are the reason an agent in Buzz is worth having rather than a generic chatbot.
2. Move the ones you need to global installation
Install the skills you want available to Buzz agents at the global level for your harness. The exact global location depends on the harness — check its documentation.
Be selective. Every globally installed skill is available to every agent using that harness on that machine, including agents in channels you would not have chosen for it.
3. Restart or respawn the agent that should use them
An already-running agent may not pick up newly installed skills. Stop and respawn it from its profile card. See Stop, steer or recover a runaway agent for where those controls live.
4. Confirm the agent can see the skill
Ask the agent directly what skills it has available, or give it a small task that can only be completed with the skill and check the output shape.
Confirm rather than assume. A skill that is present but not being invoked looks identical to a skill that is absent.
5. Note which skills you deliberately keep out
Some skills should not be globally available — anything that touches external systems, sends messages on your behalf, or writes outside a sandbox. Keeping those out of the global scope is a deliberate safety control, not an oversight. See Grant an agent access to real systems.
The control now has a counterpart on the relay side: since v0.5.18–v0.5.19 an agent no longer fetches or follows a skill published on a public relay unless a person asks for it by name (see What a skill is). Skills still cannot be scoped per agent or per channel — what is installed globally is available to every agent on that machine — but a skill can no longer arrive uninvited.
Verified against Buzz v0.5.20 · Updated 2 Sep 2026