Factory (Droid) skills. Where they live and how to install them.

What skills are in Factory

Factory's documentation describes skills as reusable SKILL.md workflows that Droid, Factory's agent, can discover, invoke and share across projects. A skill is a directory with a SKILL.md entry point, optional supporting files and frontmatter that tells Droid when the workflow applies. Factory suggests skills for procedures that are too specific for the always-on AGENTS.md file, too structured for a one-off prompt, and useful enough to reuse.

Droid reads each skill's name and description first, compares them with your request, and loads the full body only when a skill applies. Supporting files are not loaded automatically, so the skill's instructions should say when to read or run them.

Where Droid looks for skills

There are also plugin, built-in, mission and automation scopes. Droid searches skill folders recursively and treats the first directory containing SKILL.md as a skill. Outside mission and automation sessions, project skills win over personal skills, which win over built-in skills. If two skills in the same source share a name, that is invalid configuration, so rename or remove one.

Install a skill

Factory's documentation describes creating skills in these folders rather than a command for fetching them from GitHub, so the routes below use other tools or a manual copy. The examples use frontend-design from anthropics/skills, located at skills/frontend-design.

Option 1: the skills CLI

npx skills add anthropics/skills --skill frontend-design -a droid

This installs into .agents/skills/ in the project, which Droid reads as a compatibility folder. Add -g for ~/.factory/skills/.

Option 2: GitHub CLI

gh skill install anthropics/skills frontend-design --agent droid
gh skill install anthropics/skills frontend-design --agent droid --scope user

Needs GitHub CLI 2.90.0 or later, where gh skill is a public preview.

Option 3: copy the folder

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/anthropics/skills.git skills-src
mkdir -p .factory/skills
cp -r skills-src/skills/frontend-design .factory/skills/frontend-design
rm -rf skills-src

Use ~/.factory/skills/ for a personal skill. Start a new Droid session if the skill is not visible straight away.

Check that it loaded

Run /skills. The manager has Effective, User, Project, Plugins, Built-in and Import tabs. The Effective tab groups every discovered skill by status: Enabled, Disabled, Overridden (a higher-priority skill with the same name is active) or Invalid (the name, frontmatter or prompt has a problem). A valid, enabled skill that is user-invocable also appears as a slash command, so you can run /frontend-design or mention it in the middle of a prompt.

Manage, update and remove

• Turn a skill off: select it in /skills and press Space. The choice is written to disabledSkills in ~/.factory/settings.json (User tab) or the project's .factory/settings.json (Project tab). Or set enabled: false in the skill's frontmatter.
• Remove: delete the skill folder, or run npx skills remove frontend-design.
• Update: copy a newer version of the folder over the old one, or use npx skills update or gh skill update for skills those tools installed.
• Run /diagnostics after fixing a name collision to confirm it is resolved.

Troubleshooting

• The skill is not a slash command: check the file is named SKILL.md, that name and description are present, and that enabled is not false. A skill with user-invocable: false is hidden from slash invocation by design.
• Droid does not invoke it automatically: check that disable-model-invocation: true is not set, and tighten the description so it says exactly when to use the skill.
• A skill deeper in the repository does not appear: Droid may discover it only after inspecting that part of the project.
• A tool is unavailable inside the skill: allowed-tools is metadata for review and display and does not grant tools or sandbox the skill, so the session must already have the tool.
• The wrong skill is chosen: give the names and descriptions more specific wording.

Safety

Factory notes that allowed-tools is not a runtime sandbox and should not be treated as a security boundary. To enforce tool access, it points to a custom droid with a tool policy. Review SKILL.md and any scripts before installing a skill from outside your team, and do not store secrets, customer data or private host names in a skill folder, since skills are often shared through repositories.