Skill format
What a Dibbla agent skill actually is — SKILL.md with three frontmatter fields, where the installer puts it, and how the published index describes it.
A skill is how a coding agent learns to use Dibbla properly instead of guessing at commands. Installing one is covered in Use AI skills; this page is the format.
An earlier version of this page promised a reference for one. No such file
exists, in the CLI or anywhere else — a skill is a SKILL.md with YAML
frontmatter, which is what the rest of this page documents.
SKILL.md
---
name: dibbla
description: What this skill covers, in one sentence an agent can match against.
when_to_use: Concrete triggers — error strings, file names, flags, symptoms.
---
# Dibbla CLI
The body: prose and examples the agent reads once the skill is loaded.| Field | Required | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
name | yes | The skill id. Also the directory name on disk. |
description | yes | One line. This is what a discovery client shows and what an agent matches on. |
when_to_use | — | The triggers. In practice this decides whether the skill is loaded at the right moment, so it is worth more care than the description. |
Both name and description must be present and non-empty — the publish
pipeline checks exactly that before a skill goes out.
Supporting files sit beside SKILL.md in the same directory (the dibbla
skill ships examples.md, guardrails.md, manifest.md, workflows.md and
others) and are referenced from the body by relative link. Keep SKILL.md
navigable and put the depth in the neighbours.
Where the installer puts it
$dibbla skills list $dibbla skills install dibbla # machine-wide instead of this project $dibbla skills install dibbla --user
.claude/skills/dibbla/SKILL.md the skill itself, plus its supporting files
AGENTS.md pointer block, for the 2026 open standard
GEMINI.md pointer block, for Gemini CLIClaude Code reads the skill path natively; Cursor, Codex, Copilot, Windsurf,
Aider and friends read AGENTS.md. The pointer blocks are delimited by
markers, so anything you wrote in those files outside the markers survives a
reinstall byte for byte.
Skill content is embedded in the dibbla binary, so installing needs no
network and you get whatever your CLI shipped with. dibbla --version is
therefore also the answer to “which skill do I have?”, and dibbla update
is how you get a newer one.
How skills are published
Dibbla’s own skills are also served for agents that have no CLI, following the Agent Skills Discovery draft:
https://dibbla.com/.well-known/agent-skills/index.jsonEach entry carries a name, description, type (skill-md for a single
file, archive for a tarball), a url, and a sha256: digest — so a
client can verify it received what the index described.
That digest is also the sync signal for documentation: an example prompt recorded against one digest is re-run when the published digest changes, which is how these pages stay honest about behaviour that lives in the skill rather than in the CLI.