Agent skills
The four project skills bundled in the carol binary, and carol skills list and install to put them where your coding agent finds them.
Carol v0.1.22
Carol ships four agent skills inside its binary. They teach a coding agent (Claude Code, Codex or Copilot CLI) how to run an initiative with Carol and Zurdo: where to start a session, how to scope, how to publish, and how to stop cleanly. Each skill opens with an "In a Carol repository" section that maps its steps onto carol commands.
The bundled skills
| Skill | Use it to |
|---|---|
zurdo-wayfinder | Orient a session: where the initiative stands, and what this session should do. Read-only, built on carol status. |
zurdo-project | Start an initiative from an idea, scope it into phases, set up its board, pick the next phase, and run a phase review. It also says when one idea is really several initiatives. |
zurdo-github | Publish and mirror a PRD, its scope and tickets onto your tracker, and sync a run's status back, through the sync commands. |
zurdo-handoff | Write handoff.md when a session stops, then check it with carol handoff check. |
In a repository with .carol/config.toml, the skills send every tracker write through carol, not raw gh, so writes keep their plan, marker and idempotency guarantees.
These are Carol's skills. Zurdo installs its own, such as zurdo-prd-author, zurdo-prd-review and zurdo-design-author, with zurdo skills install --all. The engine loop needs those too, and its research sessions run zurdo-project.
carol skills list
carol skills list
Prints the bundled skills, one per line:
$ carol skills list
zurdo-github
zurdo-handoff
zurdo-project
zurdo-wayfindercarol skills install
carol skills install [NAME...] [--provider anthropic|codex|copilot]... [--all-providers]
Writes the skills into each provider's personal skills directory. With no names, it installs all four. With no --provider, it installs for every provider.
| Provider | Directory |
|---|---|
anthropic (Claude Code) | ~/.claude/skills/ |
codex | ~/.agents/skills/ |
copilot | ~/.agents/skills/ |
- Each installed copy carries a
.carol-managedmarker file, and a reinstall replaces the copy whole. Don't edit an installed skill by hand: your edits go at the next install. - A copy without the marker, including a symlink, is yours. Carol leaves it untouched, reports it, and exits 4.
Keep them current
The skills are compiled into the binary, so a new Carol release can bring new versions. After upgrading Carol, run carol skills install again. Until you do, carol doctor's skills check lists each installed copy as stale or missing, and fails. It also lists copies without the marker, but doesn't fail on them.
Next: Commands