Skills

A skill is a packaged set of tools that agents can call. Bundled skills ship with Sophon. Marketplace skills are downloaded and installed. Self-authored skills are generated by the agent from a natural-language description. Every skill runs in a Docker + gVisor sandbox with resource limits, no host filesystem access by default, and explicit network rules.

Anatomy of a skill

A skill is a folder with three files:

• manifest.json — machine-readable: tool names, parameters (JSON Schema), risk levels, required credentials, sandbox config
• SKILL.md — natural-language guide for the agent: what the skill does, when to use it, examples
• main.py / main.cs — the code that implements each tool

skills/my-skill/
├── manifest.json
├── SKILL.md
└── main.py         # or main.cs for C# skills

See Skill Manifest for the full schema.

Bundled skills

These ship with every Sophon install. Enable them per agent in Agents → Tools.

Developer tools

Productivity

Media

Extraction

Browse the full bundled list and per-tool details on the Skills page.

Core built-in tools

Some tools aren't in a skill — they're part of Sophon itself and always available:

• datetime.now — current time, always-available
• memory.write, memory.search, memory.list, memory.forget, memory.traverse — see Memory
• workflow.* — see Workflows
• document.* — see Documents
• connection.configure, connection.list, connection.status — see Connections
• discussion.run — see Discussion
• insights.query — see Insights
• node.command — see Sophon Node
• tool.create_chain — compose existing tools into a reusable chain
• session.spawn — sub-agent spawning for multi-agent routing

Installing marketplace skills

From the CLI:

sophon skills install notion
sophon skills install todoist
sophon skills install https://github.com/user/my-skill

From the Dashboard: Skills → Marketplace. The marketplace catalog is served by the Sophon Marketplace service; installation downloads the .sophon-skill archive, verifies its signature, unpacks it to ~/.sophon/skills/<name>/, and registers its tools.

Uninstall:

sophon skills uninstall notion

Enabling skills per agent

Every skill can be toggled per agent. By default, newly installed skills are disabled on existing agents — you have to enable them explicitly. This prevents a skill from surprising an agent that wasn't configured for it.

From the Dashboard: Agents → <agent> → Tools.

From the CLI:

sophon agents tools <agent-id> --add github.repos github.create_issue
sophon agents tools <agent-id> --remove code.lint

Risk levels and approval

Each tool declares its risk level in manifest.json:

The gate routes to the Dashboard, a mobile push notification, or the originating channel. See Approval Gates.

Self-authoring

Agents can generate their own skills from a natural-language description:

"Create a skill that fetches the weather for a given city and returns temperature + forecast."

The skill.author tool:

1. Generates Python code (main.py) implementing the tool.
2. Generates a manifest.json with parameter schema and risk level.
3. Generates a SKILL.md describing when to use it.
4. Tests the skill in a sandbox with sample parameters.
5. Requests your approval.
6. On approval, installs to ~/.sophon/skills/self-authored/<name>/.

Self-authored skills run in the same sandbox as marketplace skills. Review the generated manifest before approving — the risk level it picked determines how often you'll get prompted later.

Sandbox

Every skill runs in a Docker container with:

• gVisor for kernel isolation
• Resource limits declared in the manifest (CPU, memory, timeout)
• No host filesystem by default
• Network disabled by default — skills must declare "network": true and an allowlist
• Brokered credentials — the sandbox receives a short-lived token scoped to the tool's declared needs. The raw secret never leaves the Gateway.

The sandbox image includes Python 3.13 (with async support), .NET 10 runtime, ffmpeg, Tesseract, and a Playwright-capable Chromium.

Agent and workflow templates

Sophon ships with pre-configured agent templates (each comes with a curated skill set + SOUL.md):

sophon agents create --template devops-engineer my-devops

Plus workflow templates: Approval flow, Data pipeline, Email digest, Morning briefing.

CLI

sophon skills list
sophon skills install <name-or-url>
sophon skills uninstall <name>
sophon skills describe <name>
sophon skills author "a skill that converts Markdown to PDF"

Where to go next

• DevStudio — IDE for skill / agent / plugin / app authoring
• Skill Manifest Reference
• Approval Gates — how risk levels gate execution