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Factories > Factory configuration

Factory skills

Skills give a factory's agents repeatable, version-controlled procedures that can be shared across every agent or scoped to just one.

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A skill gives an agent a repeatable procedure, such as a security review or incident runbook. Factory skills extend an agent’s instructions without requiring changes to its prompt.

Skill sources in a factory

Section titled “Skill sources in a factory”

A factory run can use skills from three sources:

  • Role and integration skills - Default agents have GitHub skills for repository work. The foreman also has a Slack skill. Choosing Linear or Jira during setup gives relevant agents the tracker’s skill and instructions. These skills come from roles and integrations, not files in your definition.
  • Warp-provided skills - Bundled capabilities include oz-platform for cloud agents, factory-files for factory definitions, and factory-mcp for sending work to factories.
  • Custom skills - Team-owned SKILL.md files live in the factory definition and are shared across the factory or scoped to one agent. They extend the built-in skills rather than replacing them.

For bundled skill IDs and how to attribute team-owned skill usage, see Skill actions in conversation data.

When to add a custom skill

Section titled “When to add a custom skill”

Add a custom skill for procedures the built-in skills don’t cover. For example:

  • Run required tests or lint checks.
  • Follow incident-response or triage runbooks.
  • Apply a security or compliance review checklist.
  • Teach a custom agent its job. Custom agents have no built-in skills.

Skills provide instructions, not access to tools or repositories. If a procedure requires credentials or an MCP connection, configure the agent’s secrets and MCP servers through its settings. For how that access is limited, see credential boundaries.

Add or edit a skill

Section titled “Add or edit a skill”

Custom skills live in the factory’s definition, not its agent settings. You need permission to edit that definition.

To add or update a custom skill:

  1. Open the definition where it’s managed:

    • Warp-managed - In the web app sidebar, expand your factory and click Factory definition.
    • GitHub-backed - Open the connected definition repository. See Where the definition lives.

  2. Create or open the skill file for the scope you need:

    • Every agent - skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md, for shared procedures such as repository conventions.
    • One agent - agents/<agent-name>/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md, for a role-specific procedure such as a security review.

    Replace <skill-name> with the skill’s directory name and <agent-name> with the agent’s directory name.

    For example, this layout shares repository conventions with every agent and gives only the foreman an incident-triage skill:

    skills/
      repository-conventions/
        SKILL.md
    agents/
      foreman/
        skills/
          incident-triage/
            SKILL.md

  3. Write or update the skill’s instructions, name, and description. See Skill file format for frontmatter and Skill arguments for parameters.

  4. Apply the change:

    • Warp-managed - Save the definition. Warp validates and commits it.
    • GitHub-backed - Open a pull request. The factory’s pull request checks validate the change, and merging to the production branch applies it.

For an example of a shared skill and an agent-specific skill in one definition, see 02-sdlc-issue-to-pr in warp-factory-examples.

Skills and self-improvement

Section titled “Skills and self-improvement”

When a Scorer with Self-improvement enabled flags a recurring failure, the factory can update the responsible skill in a follow-up run. Changes arrive as pull requests for your team to review in the web app or your Git host.

Section titled “Related pages”