---
title: Overview
description: What an agent Skill is in this context, and the current state of one for Retidal.
---

A **Skill**, here, is not a Retidal feature — it's a portable text artifact (a `SKILL.md` file plus
reference docs) that teaches an AI coding agent how to call an API correctly: which endpoints exist, what
auth to send, what a request/response actually looks like, and the operational gotchas a plain OpenAPI spec
doesn't capture. You drop it into an agent's skills directory (for example, `~/.claude/skills/`) and the
agent reads it before it starts writing integration code against your API.

## How one would be generated for Retidal

The documentation platform this site runs on (reed) can generate a Skill pack automatically from an OpenAPI
spec — `reed skill generate --spec <name>` — deriving every endpoint, parameter, and example directly from
the spec, with a secret-scanning pass that guarantees the generated file never embeds a real credential value
(only an environment-variable placeholder).

<Warning title="Not turned on for this project yet">
  Generating a Skill pack requires a `skill.&lt;spec&gt;` block in `docs.json` naming which spec (`ingestion`
  or `management`) to generate from and where to write the output. That block isn't configured for Retidal
  today, so `reed skill generate` isn't currently wired up to produce one — running it against this project
  as-is would fail with a "no `skill.&lt;spec&gt;` entries configured" error rather than silently doing
  nothing.
</Warning>

## What you can use right now

Until a generated Skill ships, the equivalent guidance already exists as regular documentation:

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Sending events" href="/docs/sending-data/events">
    The event-ingestion contract an agent needs to write correct integration code — request shape, both
    response modes, every error code.
  </Card>
  <Card title="MCP tools" href="/mcp/tools">
    A live, callable equivalent: instead of reading a Skill, an agent can call the Retidal MCP server
    directly for a fixed set of integration and reporting tasks.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>