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Overview

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.

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).

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.

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