Skills & Tools
This page shows you how to give By Dawn’s agents the skills and tools your team relies on. By the end you’ll know where the library lives, how an item gets into it, and how a project picks exactly what its agents get.
The library is your organization’s shared set of instructions and helpers for agents. Once an item is published there, every agent that starts work on a ticket picks it up, so you write a skill once instead of copying it into every repo.
What the library holds
Section titled “What the library holds”The library has four kinds of item. The first three are the ones Claude Code itself understands:
| Kind | What an agent does with it |
|---|---|
| Skills | Instructions an agent follows when a task matches, such as how to read a loan PDF. |
| Subagents | A specialist the agent can hand part of its work to. |
| Commands | A slash command the agent can run by name. |
| Tools | A shared helper, such as a script, that skills call. A skill names the tools it needs as its dependencies. |
Skills, subagents and commands share one page with a tab for each. Tools have a page of their own, because people look for them on their own.
Where it lives
Section titled “Where it lives”The library has two levels:
- Organization: Settings, then Organization, then Skills and Settings, then Organization, then Tools. A published item here reaches every project.
- Project: Settings, then This project, then Skills and Settings, then This project, then Tools. Here a project sees the organization’s items, can switch any of them off for itself, and can add items of its own that no other project gets.
Anyone in the organization can read the library. Adding, publishing and archiving items needs an org owner or admin, because a published item changes what every agent does.
Each item shows its state: Published, Draft, Pending review or Archived, with its version number. It also shows whether evals have passed (Evals green, Evals red, or No evals) and how often agents have used it.
Add an item
Section titled “Add an item”Choose Add. You can Build with a worker or Upload a bundle.
Build with a worker
Section titled “Build with a worker”A By Dawn agent interviews you, writes the item, tests it, and hands it back for you to publish. This is the easier way, because you only need to say what the item should do.
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Open a project first. The builder works on a ticket, and the ticket is created on the project you have open.
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In Build with a worker, choose the Kind and the Scope (Org or Project). Under What should it do?, write one line, for example “Extract the borrower fields from a loan PDF”. The agent asks for the rest.
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To change an item you already have instead, pick it under Improve an existing item. Leave it on Start fresh for a new one.
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Choose Start the worker. By Dawn creates a ticket with the
library-builderlabel and starts an agent on it. -
Answer the agent’s questions on the ticket. When the draft is ready, the agent hands it back on the ticket’s mission for you to review and publish.
Upload a bundle
Section titled “Upload a bundle”If you’ve already written the item, upload it as a .tar.gz with a saw.yaml manifest and the item’s files.
Give it a Name that’s unique for that kind and scope, and choose the Kind and Scope. The upload
arrives as a draft, so nothing reaches an agent until someone publishes it.
Publish, reject and archive
Section titled “Publish, reject and archive”Choose an item to open its details. There you can see its description, usage, files, versions (pick two to compare them), dependencies and where it came from. A draft offers three actions:
- Publish makes the draft the live version. The previous version stops reaching new agents.
- Reject… asks why. The builder agent reads your reason back, so say what to change.
- Archive takes the whole item out of the library.
By Dawn checks a few things before it publishes. It refuses a name that’s already published in the same scope, and warns you when a skill depends on a tool that isn’t published. Run evals from the item’s versions with Run evals: each case checks that the item actually fired and said the right things.
Publishing or archiving a tool first lists the published skills that depend on it, because those skills change too. A skill finds its tools by name, so a new version of a tool reaches every skill that uses it.
Choose what a project gets
Section titled “Choose what a project gets”Open Settings, then This project, then Skills. The Effective set at the top says how many items an agent on this project gets today and lists them by name. It’s worked out the same way as when an agent starts.
Below it, the project’s own items sit under This project and the organization’s under Organization. To keep an organization item away from this project’s agents, turn off the switch on its row (Disable on this project). The item reads Disabled here, and no other project is affected. Turn the switch back on (Enable on this project) to bring it back. Like publishing, the switch needs an org owner or admin.
A repo can carry its own copy of a skill, subagent or command in its .claude/ folder. When it does, the repo’s
copy wins and the library item reads Overridden by repo, so a team can keep a repo-specific version without
changing everyone else’s.
Does publishing a new version change an agent that's already working?
No. An agent keeps the versions it started with until it finishes, so a ticket’s run never changes halfway. The next agent to start gets the new version.
Why can't I see Add?
Adding and publishing items needs an org owner or admin. Members can read the library and its details.
What does a tool's runtime and environment show?
What the tool says it needs on the machine to run, and the environment variables it reads. By Dawn doesn’t check these against your machines yet. Supply credentials it needs as secrets.
Where to go next
Section titled “Where to go next”- Missions and templates: the steps a ticket goes through, including the one where you publish a built item.
- Secrets: give agents the API keys and tokens your tools need.