chatpharo

Skills

Skills are structured documentation “packs” injected into prompts to improve answer quality in specific domains (Spec2, Roassal, Collections, Bloc, etc.).

How skills work

A skill is a subclass of ChatPharoSkill with:

Skills are discovered by scanning subclasses and are managed by ChatPharoSkillRegistry.

Manual skills

Manually enabled skills are always injected as:

### ENABLED SKILLS CONTEXT ###
<skill context...>

Automatic skill detection

If enabled, ChatPharo extracts keywords from the current query and injects matching skills that are marked as auto-enabled:

### AUTO-DETECTED SKILLS CONTEXT ###
(Based on detected keywords: ...)
<skill context...>

Skill tools

When skillToolsEnabled is enabled, the model can call tools such as:

This lets the model request specialized docs on demand.

Included skills (examples)

Adding a new skill (developer)

  1. Create a new subclass of ChatPharoSkill.
  2. Implement name, description, keywords, and contextString.
  3. Refresh the skills list in settings (or reset the registry).

Adding a skill from a file (user)

Users can provide extra skills as plain files on disk without writing any Pharo code. In Settings > Skills, click Add skill file… and pick a file. ChatPharo will load it on the next refresh and show it in the skills list like any built-in skill.

The file may start with an optional header block of key: value lines terminated by a line containing only ---, followed by the skill body:

name: MyProjectConventions
description: Coding conventions for my project
keywords: conventions, style, myproject
---
## My Project Coding Conventions

- Always use descriptive selectors…
- Prefer composition over inheritance…

Recognised header keys are name, description, and keywords (comma separated). If no header is present the entire file is used as the skill body and the file name becomes the skill name.

Registered file paths are persisted in ChatPharoSettings>>skillFilePaths and reloaded at startup.

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