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Skills Adapter

Agents shouldn't need every procedure configured up front — they should find expertise at the moment a task calls for it. The skills adapter is how they do: the read surface for skills, the named bundles of instructions, context, and tools that agents load on demand. It exposes a single operation, v/ops/skills, dispatched by a command field, so it costs one tool definition in an agent's palette rather than two.

It is deliberately read-only: skills are authored with the ordinary write surfaces — covia:write for workspace skills, asset:store for immutable published ones. The same resolution logic backs the agent runtime's skills index and skill_load tool, so what you see here is exactly what a loading agent receives.

Operations​

skills list — Render the Index​

Returns the skill index — one - name — description line per skill — across the given sources, searched in order. A skill in w/skills shadows a venue skill of the same name.

{
  "operation": "v/ops/skills",
  "input": { "command": "list", "sources": ["w/skills", "v/skills"] }
}

sources is optional and defaults to ["w/skills", "v/skills"]. Entries are directory paths or content-addressed asset refs (a/<hash>). When no skills exist the result is null, not an empty string — used as a config.context assemble-op, the context entry is simply skipped.

skills read — Fetch One Skill​

Returns a single skill in full: {name, description, tools, path, id, body?, context?}. body is absent for a pure toolset; context appears only when the skill bundles context entries.

{
  "operation": "v/ops/skills",
  "input": { "command": "read", "name": "workspace" }
}

Address the skill with exactly one of name (looked up across sources) or ref (a direct address such as v/skills/workspace, w/skills/reports, or a/<hash>).

Access Control​

No authentication is required — v/skills is publicly discoverable by design. Gating is per source: content-addressed refs pin asset/read and path sources pin crud/read, both inside the anonymous read-only grant scope. Loading a skill grants no authority either way — its tools are capability-checked at invocation.

The Venue Skill Library​

Every venue materialises a built-in library at v/skills/<name> covering its own mechanisms — workspace, assets, agents, orchestration, grid, secrets, scheduling, memory, MCP, HITL, skill-authoring, and more (22 skills out of the box). Module adapters ship their own: load the SQL module and its sql skill appears alongside. Agent templates declare skills: ["w/skills", "v/skills"] by default, so a new agent's index shows the whole library from its first turn.