Skills
Skills give Zeph specialized knowledge for specific tasks. Each skill is a markdown file (SKILL.md) containing instructions and examples that are injected into the LLM prompt when relevant.
Instead of loading all skills into every prompt, Zeph selects only the top-K most relevant (default: 5) via embedding similarity. This keeps prompt size constant regardless of how many skills are installed.
How Matching Works
- You send a message — for example, “check disk usage on this server”
- Zeph embeds your query using the configured embedding model
- The top 5 most relevant skills are selected by cosine similarity
- Selected skills are injected into the system prompt
- Zeph responds using the matched skills
This happens automatically on every message. You never activate skills manually.
Bundled Skills
| Skill | Description |
|---|---|
api-request | HTTP API requests using curl |
docker | Docker container operations |
file-ops | File system operations — list, search, read, analyze |
git | Git version control — status, log, diff, commit, branch |
mcp-generate | Generate MCP-to-skill bridges |
setup-guide | Configuration reference |
skill-audit | Spec compliance and security review |
skill-creator | Create new skills |
system-info | System diagnostics — OS, disk, memory, processes |
web-scrape | Extract data from web pages |
web-search | Search the internet |
Use /skills in chat to see active skills and their usage statistics.
Key Properties
- Progressive loading: only metadata (~100 tokens per skill) is loaded at startup. Full body is loaded on first activation and cached
- Hot-reload: edit a
SKILL.mdfile, changes apply without restart - Two matching backends: in-memory (default) or Qdrant (faster startup with many skills, delta sync via BLAKE3 hash)
- Secret gating: skills that declare
x-requires-secretsin their frontmatter are excluded from the prompt if the required secrets are not present in the vault. This prevents the agent from attempting to use a skill that would fail due to missing credentials
External Skill Management
Zeph includes a SkillManager that installs, removes, and verifies external skills. Skills can be installed from git URLs or local paths into the managed directory (~/.config/zeph/skills/), which is automatically appended to skills.paths.
Installed skills start at the quarantined trust level. Use zeph skill verify to check BLAKE3 integrity, then promote with zeph skill trust <name> verified or zeph skill trust <name> trusted.
See CLI Reference — zeph skill for the full subcommand list, or use the in-session /skill install and /skill remove commands for hot-reloaded management without restart.
Deep Dives
- Add Custom Skills — create your own skills
- Self-Learning Skills — how skills evolve through failure detection
- Skill Trust Levels — security model for imported skills