Docs

Skills

How FlyDocs skills work — platform skills, community skills, active skills, and progressive disclosure.

Everything in FlyDocs runs through skills. They're the core building block: bundles of instructions, knowledge, and optional scripts that tell the AI what to do and how to do it.

Types of skills

Platform skills

Platform skills ship with FlyDocs and handle the built-in workflow: session management, issue lifecycle, context graph queries. They work out of the box.

Community skills

Community skills add patterns and conventions for your stack, like React component structure, Next.js routing, TypeScript strictness, and testing approaches. Knowledge-only: the AI consults them before writing code. No scripts, no execution, just structured guidance loaded on demand. Install in seconds, or build your own. A community skill directory is coming soon.

Active skills

Active skills include executable scripts. They replace MCP servers with the same capabilities (create issues, transition work, look up documentation) at a fraction of the context cost. The AI reads the skill, runs a specific script, gets a consistent result. No tool descriptions loading every turn. No running server. Cloud-tier active skills for project management tool sync are coming soon.

How skills load

FlyDocs uses progressive disclosure to keep context efficient:

Three-Level Retrieval

L1
Skill index
A compressed manifest always in context. Tiny footprint, full discoverability. The AI knows what skills exist without loading them all.
↓ trigger matches
L2
Skill overview
Loaded when the AI recognizes a relevant trigger. Enough detail to decide whether to go deeper.
↓ task requires detail
L3
Full detail
Loaded only when the task requires it. Scripts, documentation, examples.

This means the AI carries a minimal footprint and loads what it needs when it needs it, not everything upfront.

Active skills vs MCPs

Active skills do the same job as MCP servers without the overhead:

  • 5-20x less context: no tool descriptions loading every prompt
  • Deterministic: same script, same output, every session
  • No server process: just files in your project
  • Portable: copy a skill folder to another project, or share with your team

Stay in the loop

The community skill directory and cloud-tier active skills are coming soon. Join the Discord for upcoming features, support, and early access to what's next.

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