Factory skills

Note

Warp Factories is in Early Access and available to a limited set of teams. Request access to use it with your team.

A skill tells an agent what to check, how to classify results, what to produce, and when to escalate. In a factory, skills are how you extend or override default agents, without editing their prompts directly.

Skill sources in a factory

A factory run can use skills from three sources:

• Factory role and integration skills - Baseline procedures that come from the default agent roles and integrations you configure, such as GitHub, Slack, Linear, or Jira.
• Warp-provided platform-bundled skills - Product capabilities that Warp provides, such as oz-platform, factory-files, and factory-mcp.
• Custom file-based factory skills - Team-owned SKILL.md files in the factory definition, available to every agent or scoped to one agent.

Custom file-based factory skills

A custom skill is a directory containing a SKILL.md. It’s part of the factory’s definition, not an agent’s settings. Where you place the directory decides who can use it:

skills/
  repository-conventions/
    SKILL.md
agents/
  foreman/
    skills/
      incident-triage/
        SKILL.md

• skills/<name>/SKILL.md - Available to every agent in the factory. Use this for procedures that apply regardless of role, such as your repository’s coding conventions or a shared escalation policy.
• agents/<name>/skills/<name>/SKILL.md - Available only to that agent. Use this for procedures specific to one role, such as how the review agent should apply your security checklist.

Both forms use the same SKILL.md format as skills anywhere else in Warp. See Skills for the file format, front matter, and argument syntax.

Factory role and integration skills

Every default agent starts with a baseline of role and integration skills so the factory works immediately after setup, before you write anything custom:

• GitHub - Every default agent gets a GitHub skill, covering how to read issues, open pull requests, and follow your repository’s conventions.
• Slack - The foreman also gets a Slack skill, since it’s the agent that replies in threads and DMs.
• Issue tracker - The tracker you choose during setup, Linear or Jira, adds that tracker’s skill and instructions to the agents that use it. If you don’t connect a tracker, agents keep only the GitHub and Slack skills.

These baseline skills aren’t files in your definition; they come from the agent roles and integrations you choose. Anything you add under skills/ or agents/<name>/skills/ extends this baseline rather than replacing it.

Warp-provided platform-bundled skills

Platform-bundled skills are separate from factory role and integration skills. They provide Warp capabilities such as operating cloud agents with oz-platform, editing factory definitions with factory-files, and sending work through Factory MCP with factory-mcp.

Warp provides these stable bundled-skill IDs:

Bundled skill ID	Purpose
add-mcp-server	Add an MCP server to Warp configuration.
change-keybinding	Change or remove Warp keyboard shortcuts.
claude-api	Build and maintain applications that use the Anthropic SDK.
create-skill	Create, improve, and evaluate skills.
create-tab-config	Create a Warp tab configuration.
factory-files	Create and validate file-based Warp factory definitions.
factory-mcp	Send work to a factory and collaborate through Factory MCP.
modify-settings	View or change Warp settings using the bundled settings schema.
oz-platform	Run, configure, and inspect cloud agents through the API and CLI.
pr-comments	Fetch GitHub pull request review comments for the current branch.
tab-configs	Look up the tab configuration schema and validation rules.
tui-migrate-setup	Migrate supported settings into the Warp Agent CLI.
update-tab-config	Update an existing Warp tab configuration.
warpctrl	Control and inspect a running Warp app with Warp Control.

See skill actions in conversation data for the API reference.

Attribute team-owned skill usage

The Conversation API returns skill loads as read_skill actions. Use the action’s input to classify the skill:

• input.bundled_skill_id is present - The action loaded a Warp-provided bundled reference. Exclude it when measuring usage of skills your team owns.
• Only input.skill_path is present - A path alone doesn’t identify the skill’s owner. Count it as team-owned only when the path is under a skill root your team manages, such as skills/ or agents/<name>/skills/ in the factory definition.

When to add a custom skill

Add a custom skill when a default agent needs to do something the built-in baseline doesn’t cover, such as:

• Enforcing a specific test, lint, or validation command before a change is considered complete.
• Following a runbook for a category of incident or request your triage agent sees repeatedly.
• Applying a security or compliance checklist during review that goes beyond general code quality.
• Teaching a custom agent its job. Custom agents have no built-in skills.

A skill changes what an agent knows how to do, not what it can reach. To scope access, configure the agent’s secrets and MCP servers — see factory agents and infrastructure and security.

Add or edit a skill

Where you edit a skill depends on where the factory’s definition lives:

• Warp-managed - Add or edit SKILL.md files directly in the Factory definition tab of the factory dashboard. Saving validates and commits the change in one step.
• GitHub - Add or edit the files in the connected definition repository and open a pull request. The same pull request checks that validate the rest of the definition apply to skill files.

For worked examples, including a factory-wide skill and a per-agent skill together, see 02-sdlc-issue-to-pr in the warp-factory-examples repository.

Skills and self-improvement

A factory can propose changes to a skill. When Self-improvement is on for a Scorer and it flags a recurring failure, it can edit the responsible skill in a follow-up run, the same way it can edit application code. The change still arrives as a pull request for your team to review, whether that’s through the factory dashboard or your Git host.

Related pages

• Factory agents - The agents that use a factory’s skills, and how to configure each one.
• Definitions as code - The full schema for factory.yaml, agents, automations, and runners alongside skills.
• Skills - The general skill file format, shared across Warp, cloud agents, and factories.
• Measure and improve a factory - How Self-improvement turns repeated failures into skill and code changes.