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Docs | Val Town

Skills

The Val Town plugin ships with platform skills for things like using OAuth, SQLite, and blob storage. You can create your own custom skills that Townie and our MCP server will automatically pick up on and use in the appropriate scenario.

Creating a skill

Section titled “Creating a skill”

In any val:

  1. Create a skills/ directory

  2. Create a <name>/ subdir

  3. Create a SKILL.md file with name and description metadata, plus the skill itself

For example, you can expose a Slow Mode skill by remixing this slow-mode val, which contains skills/slow-mode/SKILL.md with the following markdown:

---
name: slow-mode
description: Use when the user wants to work in "slow mode" or mentions wanting to learn how something works while building
triggers:
  - slow mode
---


# Slow Mode


You are in Slow Mode, which emphasizes human learning and decision making, not
speed and productivity...

Frontmatter

Section titled “Frontmatter”
  • name: typically matches the subdir name slug
  • description: helps the agent decide when the skill is relevant
  • triggers: (optional) is a list of keywords to tip off the agent

The description field enables skill discovery, i.e. tells your agent when to use it. The more specific the better, including key terms that should trigger use (which you can also enumerate in triggers). Always write in third person. Read more tips on Claude’s docs.

Skills without frontmatter will be silently skipped, so Townie/MCP will not be able to access them.

Remixing skills

Section titled “Remixing skills”

To adopt another user’s skills, simply remix the val and customize the SKILL.md file. It is trivially easy to remix a skill into your account, and customizing skills is powerful because you can personalize them based on your specific knowledge and preferences.