AI Skills in Sculptor — define how your coach behaves

Most teams want the same strategy methodology—but not the same voice, audience, or guardrails. AI Skills let you spell that out once and reuse it on every coach reply.

What AI Skills are really about

A skill is a persistent briefing for the coach: tone, audience, taboos, output format, or domain facts you do not want to repeat every thread.

Examples that work well:

• “Answer in short paragraphs for a non-technical founder.”
• “We sell B2B SaaS in the EU—mention GDPR only when the user asks about customer data.”
• “When you suggest next steps, use a numbered list and tie each step to a library asset if one exists.”

Skills are not a replacement for Strategy Pack phases (/intake, /market, and the rest). They sit on top of the pack so the specialist still follows methodology while respecting your house rules.

Why teams skip this (and regret it later)

Founders paste the same paragraph into every new chat. Enterprise teams rely on verbal “remember we are post-merger” comments that never reach the model. Three weeks later, outputs drift: one thread is formal for the board, another is casual for a hackathon.

Without skills, you are re-training the room on every session. With skills, you onboard the coach the way you would onboard a junior consultant: written, repeatable, reviewable.

Questions a good skill should answer

• Who is the reader (founder, PM, board, engineer)?
• What tone is required (plain, executive, provocative, cautious)?
• What must the coach never suggest (tools, hires, markets, legal shortcuts)?
• What format do you want (bullets, tables, max length)?
• What facts are always true about your venture (region, model, stage)?
• When should the coach defer to Strategy Pack phases instead of freelancing?

How Sculptor applies skills

Storage and UI

1. In workspace Chat, open Skills in the composer row.
2. Add skill → name + instructions → Save.
3. Use the checkbox to enable or disable without deleting.
4. Edit or Delete (delete uses a confirmation dialog).

Limits: up to 40 skills per browser; very long instruction bodies may be truncated when building the prompt to protect context size.

On every coach reply

When you send a message, Sculptor assembles the Strategy Pack system prompt, then appends enabled skills whose name and instructions are non-empty (appendUserSkillsToSystemPrompt).

The model sees a catalog of enabled skills (name, id, short summary). That keeps the base prompt smaller while still advertising what is available.

MCP agent path (sculpt_read_ai_skill)

If Settings → Enable MCP for assistant replies is on, replies go through POST /api/chat/agent. Enabled skills are also sent as snapshots so the model can call sculpt_read_ai_skill with a skillId and load full instructions on demand—useful when summaries are not enough.

If a skill conflicts with Strategy Pack methodology, the product rule is: prefer Strategy Pack for process, but still respect user domain facts and tone.

What skills do not do (today)

• They do not sync across devices or teammates (device-local only).
• They are not per-project presets in the database (that remains a backlog direction; skills are the shipped v1 for custom instructions).
• They do not replace org-level LLM or MCP settings on Company account.

What to prepare before you write skills

• One paragraph on who reads coach outputs.
• A short list of banned recommendations (e.g. “no paid ads until PMF”).
• Links or titles of library assets the coach should prefer when citing your strategy.
• Alignment with your current Strategy Pack phase so skills do not fight /brand or /finance work.

Who should own skills

Role	Responsibility
Founder / CEO	Tone, stage, strategic taboos
Product / strategy lead	Methodology alignment with Strategy Pack
Ops / enablement	Maintain a standard “company briefing” skill for the team
Individual contributor	Personal skills on their device for drafting style

For organisations, agree on a shared text everyone copies into their own Skills list until server-side presets exist.

Examples from the real world (names changed)

D2C wellness startup. A skill named “Clinical caution” instructs the coach never to diagnose, always to frame claims as hypotheses, and to flag regulatory review before launch copy. Enabled on every thread, it stopped contradictory health claims between /marketing and /brand phases.

Enterprise software division. A skill “Post-merger neutral tone” tells the coach to avoid vendor-bashing, name no competitor directly, and use “Option A / Option B” for political topics. Executives stopped re-editing every export before internal circulation.

Use this in Sculptor tomorrow

1. Open Sculptor and go to Chat on a project.
2. Click Skills → Add skill → paste your briefing → enable the checkbox → Save.
3. Send a message that used to need a long preamble; the coach should follow the skill without you re-pasting it.
4. Explore Strategy Pack phases in the 35-phase guide when you need structured artefacts, not just tone.

Keywords: AI skills, custom coach instructions, Sculptor Strategy Pack, startup coaching prompts, device-local AI skills.