Skills and slash commands

Type / at the start of an empty composer and a picker opens. It holds two different kinds of thing:

• Skills — packaged instructions that shape how the model does one job.
• Commands — /goal, /loop and /compact, which change how the chat behaves rather than what the model is told.

Navigate with ↑ ↓, choose with Enter or Tab, dismiss with Escape. Add your own text after the skill name before sending.

Skills

A skill is a SKILL.md file: a short front matter block and a body of instructions. Invoking one prepends those instructions to your request. That is the whole mechanism — which is why writing your own is easy.

Nineteen ship built in and all are enabled by default.

Turn individual ones off in Settings → Integrations → Skills. Only enabled skills appear in the picker.

Some skills are model-invocable and some are not. A skill marked otherwise can only be run by you typing it, so the model cannot decide on its own to enter caveman mode.

Installing more

Settings → Integrations → Skills → Skills Library browses curated third-party packs: Matt Pocock, Addy Osmani Agent Skills, Superpowers, last30days and Browserbase. Install a whole pack or pick individual skills. You can also install directly from a GitHub URL.

Each pack is pinned to a specific commit rather than tracking a branch, so an install is reproducible and cannot change under you. Downloads are restricted to GitHub hosts. Installs land in skills/ in your Minnow home, record where they came from, and are enabled immediately.

Browsing works offline — Minnow ships an index of each pack’s contents. Installing needs a network.

Writing your own

Create a folder in skills/ under your Minnow home with a SKILL.md inside:

---
name: release-notes
description: >-
  Draft release notes from the git log since the last tag. Use for /release-notes.
disable-model-invocation: true
---

# Release notes

1. Run `git log <last-tag>..HEAD --oneline`.
2. Group commits into Added / Changed / Fixed.
3. Write one user-facing line per entry. No commit hashes, no internal ticket ids.
4. Call out anything that breaks compatibility under its own heading.

Then enable it in the Skills catalog. A user skill wins over a built-in of the same name, so you can override a shipped skill by shadowing it.

/goal

/goal <condition> tells the chat to keep working until something is actually true — not until the model feels finished.

After each turn a separate evaluator agent checks the condition against the code and test results, then either confirms it or sends the chat back to work. It is the difference between “I have fixed the tests” and tests that pass.

• /goal all tests in test/orchestrator pass
• /goal clear stops the loop (stop, off and reset also work)

The goal persists on the chat across reloads. Bind a capable model to the evaluator role in Models → Routing → Goal evaluator — a weak evaluator will happily rubber-stamp a broken build.

/loop

/loop re-runs a prompt on a schedule while Minnow is open and the chat is idle.

The chat panel shows a countdown with pause, resume, skip, interval edit and stop. Loops expire after seven days.

A global ticker wakes at each loop’s stored due time, so a reload or a laptop sleep does not lose the schedule.

/goal and /loop are mutually exclusive on one chat, and /clear clears both.

/loop is not the Scheduler. A loop lives in one chat, keeps its context, and needs that chat idle. A Scheduler job is a headless run in a chosen workspace with a chosen model, independent of any conversation. Iterating on something belongs in a loop; a nightly report belongs in the Scheduler.

/compact

/compact folds older turns of the chat into a summary now, instead of waiting for the window to fill. The last couple of turns stay word for word, and nothing is deleted from the transcript. Text after the command tells the summary what to keep: /compact keep the schema decisions. /compress and /summarize are aliases. See Context, memory, and rules.

Related

• Working in chat
• Modes
• Scheduler app
• Settings app