Skills & Customization

OpenHands supports the agentskills.io skill standard. Skills live in .agents/skills/ and give agents domain-specific procedures. This covers writing skills and customizing agent behavior.

What you'll learn

• Skills follow the agentskills.io standard: SKILL.md files in .agents/skills/<name>/
• Skills give agents domain-specific knowledge and repeatable procedures
• Customize agent behavior through skills, configuration, and environment variables

Build it

First, create a directory for your new skill within the standard .agents/skills folder path. This structure ensures OpenHands can automatically discover and load the behavior.

mkdir -p .agents/skills/deploy

Next, define the procedure in a SKILL.md file with the required YAML frontmatter. Keep your instructions sequential and unambiguous so the agent executes them reliably.

# .agents/skills/deploy/SKILL.md
---
name: deploy
description: Deploy the application to staging or production
---

## Procedure
1. Run all tests
2. Build the Docker image
3. Push to the registry
4. Update the deployment

What goes wrong

Mistake	How you notice it	The fix
Skill not loading	Agent doesn't follow the procedure	Verify SKILL.md is in .agents/skills/<name>/ with correct YAML frontmatter

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