Skills and memory
Skills give a bot extra know-how for specific tasks; memory lets it remember things. Review and turn skills on and off, have a bot draft new skills, and read or edit a bot's memory.
Skills
A skill is a package of know-how for a specific kind of task: how to make a good slide deck, how to work with spreadsheets, how to follow your team's process for something. When a task matches a skill, the bot uses it, so it does the job the right way without you explaining every step.
Soul vs skill: the Soul is who the bot is and applies to everything. A skill is how to do one kind of task, used only when it's relevant.
See and change a bot's skills
- Open the bot's settings (click its name in the chat header).
- Open Skills.
The Learned skills card lists every skill in your workspace. Each row shows the skill's name, what it's for, and Used when the bot decides it's relevant.
| To | Do this |
|---|---|
| Read a skill | Click its name. The whole skill opens in a window. Click Close when you're done. |
| Turn a skill on | Flip its switch. A window opens first: Review … before enabling shows the full skill. Read it, then click Enable reviewed skill, or Cancel. |
| Turn a skill off | Flip its switch off. It happens straight away. |
| Remove a skill | Click the trash button and confirm. This takes it away from this bot only. The skill stays in your workspace, so you can turn it back on later. |
Turn off skills a bot doesn't need, to keep it focused.
Why review before turning a skill on?
A skill is instructions the bot follows. Reading it first means you know exactly what you're adding, the same way you'd check a new Soul.
Get new skills
There are three ways:
| Way | How |
|---|---|
| Have the bot draft one | After a bot does a task well, send /learn. It writes a skill from what worked, for you to review. |
| Save a run | When the run card appears after a multi-step task, click Save as skill. |
| Add from the Marketplace | Open Tools → Marketplace and add a skill to a bot. See Marketplace. |
Recipes come with skills too. When you add a recipe, its skills start off so you can check them first.
Draft a skill with /learn
Say a bot just did a great job turning last week's sales numbers into a chart, and you'll want that again.
-
In the same thread, send:
/learn
Or add notes: "/learn — always use Monday to Sunday, and put the chart in a file called sales-chart.png."
-
The bot looks back at the conversation and drafts a skill.
-
Check what it wrote. When a bot changes its own skills, a one-line note, Changed its own setup, appears in the chat with an Undo button. Read the new skill in Bot settings → Skills by clicking its name.
Changes a bot makes to its own setup go ahead with that note by default. To be asked first, set Change its own setup to Ask in Bot settings → Access → What needs your OK. See Approvals.
/learn appears in the / menu only when skill drafting is on. To stop
bots from drafting skills, turn off Settings → Experimental → Bots may draft
skills for your review.
Memory
Memory is notes a bot writes for itself, so it can remember things: your preferences, facts about your work, decisions you've made.
Memory is plain Markdown files on the bot's cloud computer. You can read and edit them yourself, right in the bot's settings.
Open a bot's memory
- Open the bot's settings (click its name in the chat header).
- Open Memory.
Memory lives on the bot's computer, so the computer needs to be awake to show it. If it's asleep, you'll see a message saying so. Open the Computer tab of the bot's computer to wake it, then open Memory again. A brand-new bot has no computer until you send it its first message.
MEMORY.md, the main notes
MEMORY.md opens first. It's the bot's main list of things to remember. If it's empty, the box says Nothing remembered yet: the bot writes notes here as it works, or you can add your own.
- Type in the box to change it.
- Click Save. Or click Discard changes to go back to what's saved.
Keep it short and to the point. The gauge above it, How much of MEMORY.md loads, shows how full it is, against limits of 200 lines and 20,000 bytes (shown as 19.5 KB). Only the first 200 lines load into each turn. Once the file passes 80% of either limit, the bars turn amber as a warning. Move longer notes into topic files before it gets there.
Topic files
Under Topic files are longer notes the bot reads when it needs them, like one file about your clients and one about your products.
- Open one: click it to edit it, then Save. Back to MEMORY.md returns to the main notes.
- Add one: type a name in New topic name (for example clients) and click New topic.
- Delete one: click its Delete button and confirm. This removes the file from the bot's computer.
If the bot changes a file while you're editing
Bots write to memory while they work. If Scout saves a change to the file you have open, you'll see Scout changed this file while you were editing, and nothing of yours is saved yet. Choose:
| Button | What happens |
|---|---|
| Reload | Shows Scout's version. Your draft is kept underneath, so you can copy from it. |
| Overwrite with mine | Saves your version over Scout's. |
Ask a bot to remember or forget something
Just tell it:
Remember that our fiscal year starts in April.
Please note: I prefer charts with a white background.
Or type / in the message box and choose /remember or /forget. When a
bot saves something, a small note appears in the chat: Saved to memory,
with the file it went into.
If something should always apply, it's more reliable to put it in the bot's Soul.
Soul, skills, and memory compared
| Soul | Skills | Memory | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What | Who the bot is and how it works | How to do specific tasks | Things the bot has learned |
| Who writes it | You (or the bot with /setup) | You, the bot (/learn), or the Marketplace | The bot, and you if you like |
| When it's used | Always | When a task matches | When relevant |
| Where to see it | Bot settings → Soul | Bot settings → Skills | Bot settings → Memory |