Skills & prompt templates

Teach Tau reusable know-how with skills, and stop retyping instructions with 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

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

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

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. At TUI startup, Tau also shows a red transcript alert when skills or prompt templates in different locations share a name. The alert lists both paths so you can rename or remove the unintended duplicate; Tau still uses the higher-precedence resource.

Skills

A skill is a directory containing a SKILL.md file, following the Agent Skills spec. The directory name is the skill name. Optional frontmatter gives it a description:

~/.tau/skills/security-review/SKILL.md

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

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

Any supporting files (references, snippets) can live alongside SKILL.md inside the same directory.

cd ~/.tau/skills
mkdir review && mv review.md review/SKILL.md

Tau’s own extension and provider workflows are packaged documentation rather than built-in skills. They remain available to the agent without appearing in your skill list, competing with your skill names, or being disabled by --no-skills.

Tau lists loaded user and project skills in the system prompt so the model knows they exist and can read the full file (via the read tool) when relevant. Run /skills to search names and descriptions, then select one to insert its invocation into the prompt for further instructions. In the picker, F1 opens the complete header description and Ctrl+Enter displays the full SKILL.md in the transcript for inspection without adding it to model context. Or invoke one explicitly:

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

For longer instructions, put the request on following lines:

/skill:security-review

Check the changes on this branch.
Pay special attention to authentication boundaries.

/skill:<name> is a prompt-expansion path — Tau expands the skill and any inline or multiline request into your prompt, then runs it as a normal turn.

Prompt templates

A prompt template is a saved prompt you trigger by its filename. For example, ~/.agents/prompts/wt.md is invoked with /wt. Run /prompts in the TUI to search every loaded template. Press Enter to insert its invocation without submitting it, or Ctrl+E to edit its Markdown directly. Save with Ctrl+S; Tau reloads resources automatically. The filenames prompts.md and tools.md are reserved for built-in commands; Tau ignores templates with those names and reports a resource diagnostic. 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 after the invocation, for example /wt add caching.

The filenames prompts.md and skills.md are reserved for the built-in /prompts and /skills pickers. Tau ignores either template and reports a resource diagnostic; rename the file to load it as a custom prompt.

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>.