Skills, subagents, profiles
Skills as short playbooks that attach automatically, plus sub-agents and profiles.
- Skills are short playbooks (
skills/*.md) withtriggers. Matching ones attach automatically (keyword match, no model call); the model can pull any other withuse_skill(name)or one section withuse_skill(name, section=...). Every skill is listed with a one-line "use when" so the model can choose. A playbook already in the conversation is named, not pasted again.- Always on:
ponytail(do the least that fully works),grounded,house-rules. - On match:
debugging,code-review,security,refactor,testing,performance,database,api-design,git-workflow,review-pr,review-changes,review-commits,bug-hunt,scalability,typescript,feature-planning. - Skills are read from
~/.zerd/skillsfirst, then Claude Code's,agentsand pi's folders. Turn one off withdisabled_skills.
- Always on:
- Subagents are declared in a profile (
[[subagents]]: name, description, goal_prompt, allowed_tools, role).rolepicks a routing chain, so exploration runs cheap and debugging runs strong. Sub-agents start no MCP servers, can't spawn more, and cap answers at 6000 chars. - Repo profiles (
profiles/<name>.toml): per-project instructions,forbidden_paths,forbidden_commands,verify_rules, routing, enforced in the tool layer. Auto-selected by path, orprofile = "name".profiles/tunyt.tomlis a worked example.