Skills

A skill is a focused, multi-step task Axon can run as a sub-task — you ask for it in plain language, it runs independently (it can't see the rest of your conversation), and it comes back with a finished result. Think of it as delegating a specific job rather than having a back-and-forth chat about it.

#Built in

• Research a question — answers an open-ended question by searching repeatedly and synthesizing across multiple sources, citing every claim. Good for "what does everything in this project say about X," where one search wouldn't cover it.
• Compare documents — compares two or more documents and reports where they agree, where they disagree, and what only one of them covers. Good for comparing contract drafts, policy versions, or competing proposals.
• Summarize a document — produces a structured brief for one document: an executive summary, key points, and open questions. Good for getting the gist of a long document before reading it in full.

#Using one

Just ask for what you want — "compare the two vendor proposals" or "summarize the onboarding doc" is enough; Axon picks the matching skill and runs it. You don't need to name the skill exactly.

#Seeing your skills

The sidebar has a Skills section listing every skill, where you can open one to read how it works or import a new one — but it's hidden until you want it. Turn on Show skills in Settings → General to show it. Skills run whether the section is shown or not.

#What you get back

A skill's result is written into the conversation like any other answer, with citations back to the documents it used. To keep it as a document, choose Add to artifacts from the chat's More options menu (⋮, top right of the chat) — that saves the conversation into the project's Artifacts. From there, Add to sources copies it into the project's folder and indexes it, so later questions can cite it like any other document. See Artifacts & documents for more on both.

#Adding a skill from GitHub

Beyond the three built in above, you can add a skill someone else wrote and published on GitHub as a SKILL.md file — the same format Anthropic's own Claude Skills use. Give Axon a link to the skill's own folder (not the whole repository) and ask it to add it, for example:

https://github.com/example-org/some-skills/tree/main/skills/literature-review add this skill

Axon fetches only that folder — nothing else on GitHub, nothing on the rest of the web — and tells you what it found: the skill's name, its description, and whether it already runs as a fixed pipeline or would run free-form like Research a question does. Nothing is saved at this point. Only when you press Import this skill on that card does Axon fetch it again for real and write it to disk; after that, restart Axon and the new skill appears in the sidebar's Skills section alongside the built-in ones (see Seeing your skills above). The section's own import button (Import a skill from GitHub) does the same without a chat.

This only works from the Axon User Guide project in the app while the feature is new. If you try it from another project, Axon will tell you to go there first.