Skills and the catalog

A skill is a way of doing something, like writing release notes or triaging a bug, written down so a hire can follow it. Hires only read a skill when the task calls for it, so having many costs nothing.

The libraryCopy Anchor Link

Your workspace keeps its skills in one library: Settings → Skills. Turn skills on for each hire on its Skills tab.

Adding skillsCopy Anchor Link

Click Add skill and pick one of these:

• From the catalog: skills picked for everyone on Roster. Search, then Add. It's copied into your library, so your edits stay yours.
• Write one: a name, a one-line description of when to use it, and the instructions.
• Upload a folder: a skill in the standard format, a SKILL.md with its files.
• From GitHub: the address of a public GitHub folder that holds a SKILL.md.

The quickest way to give one hire a skill: on its Skills tab, click Add skills and pick from the catalog; Roster adds it to the library and turns it on for that hire in one go.

Skills from other authorsCopy Anchor Link

Next to Roster's own skills (code review, release notes, customer replies and the rest), the catalog has public skills written by people outside Roster, mostly for design and front-end work:

• Jakub Krehel: better-interface, better-ui, better-layout, better-typography, better-colors, better-accessibility, better-writing, interface-review, build-design, explain-interface, state-machine, variant and teardown.
• Emil Kowalski: animation (animate, animate-expo, choreograph, gestures, animation-performance, animation-vocabulary, review-animations, improve-animations, find-animation-opportunities, remove-animations), design (emil-design-eng, apple-design, break-ui, prototype, mobile-native, pick-ui-library), plus ask-sonner and write-swift.
• Benji Taylor: stageshow, for faux product screens and demo animations.

Each one says who wrote it, its licence (all are MIT) and a link to where it came from. When you add one, its licence and an ATTRIBUTION.md come with it into your library: please keep them if you edit or share the skill. They're the versions from a fixed point in each author's repository, so they don't change under you.

stageshow is too big to bring in whole: you get its instructions, references and teaching scenes, and its ATTRIBUTION.md says how to get the rest (its React kit and examples) from the author's repository. Its app icons and brand artwork aren't under its licence, so they're left out.

Drafts hires writeCopy Anchor Link

When someone shows a hire how to do something, it may write it down as a skill. Those arrive as Drafts to review at the top of the library. They do nothing until you approve them.

Keeping catalog skills currentCopy Anchor Link

When the catalog's version of a skill you copied changes, the skill says Update available. Updating takes the catalog's latest description, instructions and files, replacing your edits to them.