Skills and Tools¶
Why this page exists¶
Magieva has two things that extend what Maggie can do, and they are easy to confuse because both sound like "add-ons". They are genuinely different, they live in different places in the product, and knowing which one you need saves a lot of hunting.
Skills are knowledge. Tools are programs.¶
| Skills | Tools | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Written expertise Maggie reads | A program Maggie runs |
| What it changes | How she approaches a problem | What she can produce |
| Where you find it | Marketplace | Tools |
| Analogy | Giving her a manual | Giving her an instrument |
Skills¶
A Skill is written guidance — a method, a house style, a checklist, an approach to a category of problem. Installing one means Maggie reads it and applies it when the situation calls for it.
If you install a Skill about writing discovery-call summaries, she does not gain a new button. She gets better at that job: the structure she reaches for, the questions she thinks to ask, the things she flags.
Browse and install them from Marketplace.
Because Skills are knowledge rather than programs, a Skill cannot "fail to run" — there is nothing to execute. If Maggie is not applying one you installed, the question is whether the situation matched it, not whether it crashed.
Tools¶
A Tool is a real program that executes and returns a result — converting a file, extracting data, calling an external service, transforming an image.
Tools are what let Maggie change something in the world rather than describe it. When she uses one, you see it in the task log along with what it returned, and it can fail in ordinary ways: bad input, an unreachable service, a timeout.
Find them under Tools.
Which one do you need?¶
Ask what is missing.
- She could do this if she knew how we do it here. → Skill
- She could do this if she had something that can actually do it. → Tool
"Summarise our calls the way we like them" is a Skill. "Transcribe this audio file" is a Tool. "Summarise our calls the way we like them, from recordings" needs both.
They work together¶
Most real capability is a pairing. The Tool does the mechanical work; the Skill decides what to do with the result and how to present it. Adding a Tool without the judgement to use it well gets you raw output; adding a Skill with no Tool to act on gets you good intentions.
Why the naming¶
"Skills" is the industry-standard term for installable written expertise, and that is exactly what the Marketplace offers. "Tools" is what the things that execute actually are. The two inventories were both once called skills, which was a reliable source of confusion — hence the split.
Where to go next¶
- How Magieva works
- Talking to Maggie