# 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](https://exaflux.io/docs/axon/artifacts-and-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.