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Tau

Skills & prompt templates

Tau loads two kinds of reusable Markdown from disk: skills (how to do a task) and prompt templates (a saved prompt you trigger by name). Both can live at the user level (available everywhere) or inside a project.

Where the files go

Section titled “Where the files go”

Skills are loaded from these locations, in increasing precedence (later overrides earlier on name clashes):

~/.tau/skills/
~/.agents/skills/
~/.agents/
<cwd>/.tau/skills/
<cwd>/.agents/skills/
<cwd>/.agents/

Prompt templates load from:

~/.tau/prompts/
~/.agents/prompts/
<cwd>/.tau/prompts/
<cwd>/.agents/prompts/

After adding or editing files while the TUI is open, run /reload to rediscover them. Duplicate/overridden resources are reported as diagnostics, not fatal errors.

Skills

Section titled “Skills”

A skill is a Markdown file describing how to accomplish something. The filename is the skill name. Optional frontmatter gives it a description:

---
description: Review a diff for security issues.
---


Steps to review the current diff for security problems...

Tau lists loaded skills in the system prompt so the model knows they exist and can read the full file (via the read tool) when relevant. Invoke one explicitly:

/skill:security-review check the changes on this branch

/skill:<name> is a prompt-expansion path — Tau expands the skill into your prompt and runs it as a normal turn.

Prompt templates

Section titled “Prompt templates”

A prompt template is a saved prompt you trigger by its filename. For example ~/.agents/prompts/wt.md becomes the prompt wt. Templates can include variables with {{ name }}:

---
description: Implement a feature in an isolated git worktree.
---


Implement this feature safely in a new worktree:
{{ feature }}

If a template has no placeholders, your arguments are appended after a blank line. Variables are filled from the arguments you pass when invoking it.

Skill vs. prompt template — which?

Section titled “Skill vs. prompt template — which?”
  • Use a prompt template when you keep typing the same instructions and just want a shortcut (with optional fill-in variables).
  • Use a skill when you want to give the model reference know-how it can pull in when a task calls for it, invoked with /skill:<name>.