Skills Overview

Understand the types of skills and tools your Comis agents can use

Comis agents come equipped with a variety of skills and tools. Some are built in, some come from the platform, and you can create your own. This page explains the different types and how they work together.

Understanding Skills and Tools

Agents use tools to take actions in the world — search the web, send messages, read files, manage schedules, and more. Tools are pieces of code that actually do things. When an agent decides it needs to look something up online, it calls the web_search tool. When it needs to create a file, it calls the write tool. Tools are the hands of your agent.

Skills are different. They are custom instructions you write to teach agents new behaviors. A skill might define a customer support persona, a code review checklist, or a set of rules for moderating a community. Skills are knowledge that guides how your agent thinks and responds — they shape its personality, its expertise, and its approach to problems.

Together, tools give your agents capabilities and skills give them expertise. An agent with the right tools can do almost anything; an agent with the right skills knows exactly how to do it.

The Four Types

Comis organizes all agent capabilities into four categories. Each serves a different purpose and comes from a different source:

Type	What It Is	Examples	Who Creates It
Built-in Tools	Core tools for file operations, web access, and shell commands	read, write, exec, web_search, browser	Comes with Comis
Platform Tools	Comis-specific tools for messaging, scheduling, and administration	cron, message, sessions_spawn, gateway	Comes with Comis
Prompt Skills	Custom Markdown instruction files that teach agents new behaviors	Customer support persona, code review checklist	You create these
MCP Tools	External tools from MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers	Database queries, third-party APIs, custom integrations	External servers

The first two types (built-in tools and platform tools) ship with Comis and are ready to use out of the box. The last two (prompt skills and MCP tools) are ways you can extend your agents with custom capabilities.

Built-in Tools

The “built-in tools” page covers the foundational tools that ship with every Comis agent — file operations, shell execution, web access, and browser automation. These are the lowest layer in the tool stack: any agent built on the underlying coding-agent framework gets them out of the box.

• File operations — read, write, edit, search files; apply patches; edit Jupyter notebooks
• Shell commands — execute commands and manage background processes inside an OS-level sandbox
• Web access — search the web (8 providers) and fetch page content
• Browser automation — control a headless Chromium browser (16 actions)
• Context tools — search and recall content from the current session or the compressed context DAG

You can enable or disable each one individually through configuration, so an agent that should not run shell commands can have exec turned off while keeping everything else.

See Built-in Tools for the complete reference with parameters and usage examples.

Across built-in tools and platform tools combined, Comis ships 70 tools in total. The 70 break down across functional categories: web (2), files (7), apply_patch (1), exec/process (2), terminal driver (9), memory (5 including opt-in memory_ask), sessions (6), agents (4 including pipeline), messaging (6), scheduling (1), media (6), infrastructure/context (4 + 4 context-DAG), and fleet admin (8). See Built-in Tools and Platform Tools for the per-category breakdown.

Platform Tools

Platform tools are specific to Comis. There are tools across categories including:

• Scheduling — create cron jobs and manage heartbeat timing
• Messaging — send, reply, react, edit, and delete messages across any connected channel
• Sessions — manage conversations, spawn sub-agents, run pipelines
• Media — analyze images, generate speech, transcribe audio, process documents
• Infrastructure — read and modify configuration at runtime
• Memory — search, read, and store long-term memories
• Fleet management — supervisor-level tools for managing the entire installation
• Platform actions — platform-specific moderation for Discord, Telegram, Slack, and WhatsApp

These let your agents interact with the Comis ecosystem — sending messages across channels, scheduling recurring jobs, analyzing images, managing other agents, and more.

See Platform Tools for the full overview, or browse the Agent Tools tab for detailed guides on each category.

Prompt Skills

Prompt skills are Markdown files (with a special SKILL.md format) that you write to teach your agents new behaviors. No coding required — you write instructions in plain language, and Comis loads them into the agent’s context.

A prompt skill might define:

• A customer support persona with tone guidelines and escalation procedures
• A set of moderation rules for a Discord community
• A research methodology that the agent follows step by step
• A code review checklist with specific criteria to check

Prompt skills are the easiest way to customize your agent. If you can write a document, you can write a prompt skill.

In a multi-agent setup, each named agent automatically discovers skills from its own workspace directory. Skills can be scoped as agent-local or shared across all agents. See Prompt Skills for the full scoping model.

See Prompt Skills for a walkthrough on creating your first skill.

MCP Tools

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that lets AI agents connect to external tool servers. If someone has built an MCP server for a database, a CRM, a project management tool, or any other service, your Comis agents can use those tools directly. This is how you extend Comis with capabilities from the broader AI ecosystem without writing any code yourself.

Comis connects to MCP servers over standard I/O or HTTP, discovers available tools automatically, and makes them available to your agents alongside built-in and platform tools.

See MCP Integration for setup instructions.

How Tools Get Selected

Not every agent needs every tool. Comis lets you configure a tool policy for each agent, controlling exactly which tools it can access. Think of it like giving each agent a specific toolbox: a coding agent might have file and shell tools, while a customer service agent might have only messaging tools.

Comis ships with five named profiles plus two specialised “minimal” presets for non-interactive runs, so you can quickly set the right level of access:

• minimal — read + write, for highly restricted agents
• coding — file operations, shell, and process management for development agents
• messaging — message + session_status for communication-focused agents
• supervisor — fleet-management tools for administration agents
• full — all tools with no restrictions (this is the default)
• cron-minimal — safe subset for scheduled cron jobs (web, message, basic file/memory, cron itself)
• heartbeat-minimal — even narrower subset for periodic agent heartbeats

See Tool Policy for details on configuring tool access.

Explore Skills

Built-in Tools

File operations, shell commands, web search, and browser automation

Platform Tools

Messaging, scheduling, sessions, media, and administration tools

Prompt Skills

Write custom instruction files to teach agents new behaviors

MCP Integration

Connect to external tool servers using the Model Context Protocol

Tool Policy

Control which tools each agent can use

Agent Tools

See every platform tool in action — the master reference for all Comis-specific tools