Skills and automations
Turn repeatable work into reusable SOPs your agents run on demand or on a schedule — and understand where Skills live: system, agent, or space.
The second time you explain the same workflow to an agent, you've found a Skill. Skills capture how a job is done so you never re-explain it; Automations decide when it runs. Together they turn one-off instructions into reliable, repeatable SOPs — the difference between a helpful assistant and a real operation.
What a Skill is
A Skill is a reusable workflow — a packaged SOP an agent can call by name. It isn't another employee; it's a method the agent uses. Examples:
- Generate a PPT from an outline
- Rewrite a blog post for Xiaohongshu, LinkedIn, and video
- Run a competitive-research process
- Process and clean an Excel file
A Skill bundles its instructions, and may include scripts the agent runs inside its cloud computer.
What an Automation is
An Automation is a Skill (or task) on a schedule or trigger — run it every morning, every Monday, or on an event, with no one in the loop. Skills define how; Automations define when.
Skill = the SOP. Automation = the SOP, running on its own.
Where Skills live: scope
Every Skill has a scope that determines who can use it and how broadly it's shared:
| Scope | Lives in | Available to |
|---|---|---|
| System | Built into Buda | Every agent, everywhere — the standard toolkit |
| Agent | One agent's workspace | Just that agent |
| Space | A Space | Every agent in the Space |
Use agent scope for a workflow only one specialist needs, space scope to share an SOP across your team, and reach for system Skills for common capabilities that ship with Buda.
When to make a Skill
If a task happens once, just do it — don't package it. When a workflow keeps repeating ("every finished blog post becomes a Xiaohongshu post, a LinkedIn post, and a video script"), turn it into a Skill so any agent runs it the same way every time. Then attach an Automation if it should run on a schedule.
You can also install ready-made Skills from the Marketplace or author your own — see create a custom skill.