Skills Guide

Skills are specialized knowledge modules that extend Solaris's AI capabilities. They provide domain-specific expertise, templates, workflows, and instructions that the AI uses to perform specialized tasks with higher accuracy.

What Are Skills?

A skill is a structured knowledge package — typically a SKILL.md file and optional supporting resources — that gives the AI detailed instructions for a specific domain. When a skill is enabled, the AI can discover and use it via the tool-search-tool mechanism, which keeps the system prompt lean while making hundreds of capabilities available on demand.

How Skills Work

1. Discovery: When you ask the AI to do something, it searches available skills for relevant expertise
2. Loading: The matching skill's instructions are loaded into context
3. Execution: The AI follows the skill's detailed guidance to complete your task
4. Output: Results are produced according to the skill's templates and quality standards

Skill Categories

Built-in Skills

Pre-packaged with Solaris, always available:

• PDF — Create, manipulate, extract, merge, and fill PDF documents
• XLSX — Create and edit spreadsheets with formulas, formatting, and data analysis
• DOCX — Create and edit Word documents with tracked changes, comments, and formatting
• PPTX — Create and edit PowerPoint presentations with layouts and speaker notes
• Browser Use — Web automation, search, research, and online task execution

General Skills

A library of creative and productivity skills:

• Advertisement — Create professional ad campaigns and marketing materials
• Algorithmic Art — Generate mathematical and generative art
• Brand Guidelines — Develop comprehensive brand identity documents
• Brochure — Design informational brochures and pamphlets
• Carousel — Create social media carousel posts
• Digital Planner — Design interactive digital planners
• E-book — Create formatted e-books and publications
• Infographic — Design data-driven infographics
• Poster — Create visual posters for events, marketing, etc.
• And many more...

Scientific Skills

Specialized skills for scientific research and analysis:

• AlphaFold Database — Protein structure analysis
• AnnData — Single-cell genomics data handling
• Bioinformatics tools — Various computational biology skills
• Data analysis frameworks — Statistical and computational tools
• Over 130 scientific domain skills available

Managing Skills

Accessing the Skills Panel

1. Click Settings (gear icon) at the bottom of the sidebar
2. Navigate to the Skills tab
3. View all available skills organized by category

Enabling & Disabling Skills

• Each skill has a toggle switch to enable or disable it
• Enabled skills are available for the AI to discover and use
• Disabled skills are hidden from the AI
• Your enable/disable preferences persist across sessions

Skill Information

Each skill card shows:

• Name — The skill's display name
• Description — What the skill does
• Category — Built-in, General, Scientific, or Custom
• Type — Built-in, Custom, or MCP-based
• Group — Logical grouping (e.g., "creative", "document", "research")

Using Skills in Conversations

You don't need to explicitly "call" a skill. Simply describe what you want, and the AI will automatically find and use the right skill:

Examples

• "Create a professional brochure for my consulting business" → Uses the Brochure skill
• "Make an infographic showing our quarterly sales data" → Uses the Infographic skill
• "Generate a PDF report from this data" → Uses the PDF skill
• "Create a PowerPoint presentation for my research findings" → Uses the PPTX skill
• "Design an advertisement for our new product launch" → Uses the Advertisement skill

Skill-Powered Creative Hub

Many skills produce visual outputs that automatically appear in the Creative Hub:

• Generated brochures, posters, and advertisements
• Infographics and data visualizations
• E-books and digital planners
• Algorithmic art pieces

Tips for Getting the Most from Skills

• Be specific about format: "Create a PDF report" vs. "Create an XLSX spreadsheet" helps the AI choose the right skill
• Provide context: The more details you give (content, style, audience), the better the output
• Check the Creative Hub: Generated creative works are saved automatically
• Enable relevant skills: If working on scientific research, enable the scientific skills you need
• Combine skills: Ask for multi-step workflows that use multiple skills in sequence

Troubleshooting

Skill not being used

• Check that the skill is enabled in Settings → Skills
• Be more explicit in your request about the desired output format
• Verify the skill is available for your skill category

Output quality issues

• Provide more detailed requirements in your prompt
• Specify the target audience, style, and content requirements
• Iterate with follow-up messages to refine the output

Skills not loading

• Restart Solaris if skills aren't appearing
• Check the Logs tab in Settings for any skill loading errors
• Ensure the skills directories are intact and not corrupted

Skills make Solaris infinitely extensible. The more skills you enable, the more your AI coworker can do.