Viewing, adding, creating, and sharing skills requires a Pro, Scale or Enterprise plan. Suggested skills on the Home Page below the prompt are available to all users on every plan.
A skill is a set of instructions you can hand to Elicit's agent so it approaches a task a particular way. Instead of writing out the same detailed prompt every time you run a market sizing or a landscape review, you reference the skill and the agent follows it.
Skills come from three places: Elicit's native skills, skills other Elicit users on your team share with you, and skills you create yourself.
Using a skill
There are three ways to bring a skill into a session.
The slash command
Type / in the prompt box to open a searchable list of skills. Start typing to filter it, then choose one and it is inserted inline with the rest of your prompt. You can keep writing around it, so a skill can sit alongside the specific question you are asking.
Suggested skills below the prompt
The suggestion buttons under the prompt box are now skills. Click one to add it directly, or browse the strategy and landscape skills from the same place. These are available on all plans.
The Add skill menu
Click the + button at the bottom left of the prompt box to open the Add skill menu:
The skills menu will display:
Your skills: the ones you have added or created. This is the default view.
Your team's shared skills (if you are a member of a team): anything a colleague has shared with your team. If it is shared with you, you can use it.
Elicit's native skills: skills Elicit has built, available in all sessions. Click one to read more about what it does, or add it to your team.
What happens when the agent uses a skill
Ask your question with the skill referenced and the agent will follow the skill's instructions when answering your prompt.
Clicking the skill in your message opens it so you can view the skill's instructions. For a skill you created, you see its contents, can edit the skill, and can download the skill's files. For an Elicit native skill, you see a description of what it does rather than the underlying instructions.
Creating a skill
Ask the agent to build it
The easiest way to create a skill is to describe what you want and let the agent write it. For example: create a skill that looks at only the past week of news reports on a topic and compiles it into a newsletter. The user must supply the topic.
The agent drafts the skill and shows you what it intends to create: the files, the name, the description, and the instructions themselves. Nothing is saved until you approve it, and you can create, revise, or cancel at that point. Once created, the skill is available immediately in the session you are in as well as in future sessions.
Upload a skill
You can upload a skill as a .zip file, including one someone sent you from their own Elicit account. The zip file must contain a SKILL.md file at the root to upload it successfully. Before you create it you can look through what the skill contains, take actions on the files, and make manual edits.
Write one yourself
You can also write a skill by hand in Elicit. This is useful for something small or for testing, though for most skills it is easier to describe what you want and let the agent draft it.
Write a clear description
A skill's description is not just a label. It tells the agent in later sessions when to reach for this skill instead of another one, so a vague description makes a skill harder for the agent to apply well. Say what the skill is for and when it should be used.
Managing your skills
Click the + button at the bottom left of the prompt and choose Add Skill to open the Skills menu. From there you can:
Edit with Elicit: describe the change you want and the agent edits the skill for you.
Edit manually: change the name, the description, or the skill contents yourself.
Share or unshare with your team, if you're on a Scale or Enterprise plan: make the skill available to your colleagues, or take it back out of the shared list.
Download as a .zip: useful for sharing a skill with someone outside your team, or off Elicit entirely.
Delete: remove the skill from your list.
Sessions keep the version they used
Skills change over time, and an old session does not change with them. When you open a past session, the skill you see is the version that was used at that time, not the current one.
This matters when a skill has been substantially edited (i.e., your needs for the skill evolved so you've edited it over time). If an old session's results do not match what the skill says it does today, you can look back at the version that actually ran and see why.