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Overview

Skills are slash commands that coding agents execute on demand. Invoke any skill with /<skill-name> — in the Blocks sandbox, in Slack, in GitHub, or in Linear. Skills can be created from the Blocks dashboard or committed directly to your repos as files. All sources are merged, so the coding agent always has access to your full skill set regardless of where they’re defined.

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How Blocks loads skills

Blocks discovers and merges skills from three sources: Dashboard skills Skills created in the Blocks dashboard are available workspace-wide and loaded into every coding agent session automatically. Global repo If your workspace has a global repo configured, Blocks loads skills from its .claude/skills/, .codex/skills/, and .agents/skills/ directories. These are merged with your dashboard skills. Per-repo skills When Blocks clones a repo for a session, it scans the same directories (.claude/skills/, .codex/skills/, .agents/skills/) and loads any skills found there. These are immediately available to the coding agent for that session. All three sources are merged — the coding agent sees one unified list of skills regardless of where they originated. If two sources define a skill with the same name, Blocks appends a number to avoid conflicts (e.g., review-security and review-security2).
The folder pattern (.claude, .codex, .agents) doesn’t matter — Blocks picks up skills from all of them. Use whichever matches your team’s coding agent setup.

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Creating skills

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From the dashboard

  1. Navigate to Dashboard > Skills
  2. Click Create
  3. Enter a Name (this becomes the slash command, e.g., review-security) and a Prompt
  4. Click Save
Dashboard skills are loaded into the coding agent sandbox automatically. Invoke them with /<skill-name> or select them from the Skills menu in the message box. You can add extra context after the skill name to customize the request for a specific task.

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From a repo

Create a SKILL.md file inside a named folder in any supported directory: 
.claude/skills/review-security/SKILL.md
The folder name becomes the slash command. The SKILL.md file contains the prompt the coding agent will execute. Commit skills to your global repo to share them across all sessions, or to any individual repo to make them available only when that repo is active. Example skill prompts: review-security — Review this code for security vulnerabilities. Focus on SQL injection, XSS, auth/authorization issues, and secrets in code. Provide specific line numbers and suggested fixes. add-docs — Add documentation to this code including function/method descriptions, parameter explanations, return values, and usage examples. gen-tests — Generate unit tests covering edge cases, happy paths, and error handling. Aim for at least 80% code coverage.

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Using skills

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In Slack, GitHub, Linear, and other integrations

Prefix with @blocks: 
@blocks /review-security
@blocks /plan /gen-tests
@blocks /add-docs for the authentication module

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Managing skills

Edit or delete skills from Dashboard > Skills. Changes take effect in the next session.