Skills & capabilities

A bot doesn't have a fixed, hard-coded set of abilities. Instead, its abilities come from skills: modular capability packs the bot reads when they're relevant to what you've asked. When you ask for something, the bot finds the skill that matches and follows it.

GATE ships with around 60 built-in skills, spanning third-party integrations, infrastructure, autonomous agents, and self-contained vertical tools.

The mental model

Think of each skill as an instruction sheet for one kind of work. A skill describes when to use it, the steps to follow, and the commands or behaviors it unlocks. The bot scans the available skills against your request, picks the one that fits, reads it, and acts on it.

You don't invoke skills by name. You describe what you want — "send this email", "check our Stripe balance", "spin up a server" — and the bot routes to the matching skill on its own.

What a skill looks like

Each skill is a self-contained instruction pack: a short summary of when it applies, plus the detailed steps and the actions or behaviors it unlocks. The bot matches your request against those summaries, then reads the full skill only for the one it picks — so it stays fast and accurate even with dozens of skills available.

How skills surface

A skill exposes its capability in one or both of two ways:

As commands your bot can run on the server

Most skills map to an action your bot can run on GATE's server on your behalf. For example, the Gmail skill drives Gmail actions, the Stripe skill drives Stripe actions, and the calendar skill drives calendar actions.

The skill explains which actions exist and how to use them; the bot runs them on your behalf — you just ask.

Developers and server operators can see the full command reference in the operator documentation.

As chat behaviors

Some skills shape how the bot behaves in conversation rather than running an action on the server — for example, conventions for presenting results as visual cards, or rules for deciding between two ways of making a code change. These don't add actions; they add judgment.

Scope: where a skill applies

Every skill has a scope that controls where it's active. The frontmatter value is one of:

• bot — available while the bot is talking to you in a chat session.
• cs — available inside the separate code sessions the bot can spawn to do software work (see Sessions).
• both — active in chat and in code sessions.

This is why some skills only show up when the bot is writing code, and others only when it's chatting with you.

A skill's frontmatter can also carry requires_role: master_admin, which hides the skill from everyone except master admins — org and fleet administration skills use this.

Integrations are skills too

Connecting to outside services — Gmail, Google Calendar, Notion, Shopify, Stripe, and the rest — works through integration skills. Each one is a thin proxy: the bot calls the service on your behalf, and for the provider-backed services the actual credentials live in GATE's integration provider, not in GATE. A few services are first-party instead — Slack, GitHub, and social accounts — and for those GATE stores the tokens itself, encrypted. Either way, the token never enters the bot's process.

Going deeper

For how skills are authored, scoped, and extended, see the Developer track on Skills & extending GATE.