---
title: "Author Agent Skills Right in Your CMS"
description: "Add a skill document type to Sanity so editors can write down the conventions your agents follow, from module choices to brand voice."
---

# Author Agent Skills Right in Your CMS

![boring japanese salaryman heroically raising the Excalibur sword with the lettering "Skill" engraved on the sword, lightning striking in the background](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/cyu7k2r0/production/7b223c43847c47405686d63559843d207b1e1ad2-1537x1023.png)

Agents are getting good at building and editing content. The catch is that a capable agent still does not know how *your* site works: which module to reach for, how your design tokens are named, or the voice your blog is written in. That knowledge usually lives in a senior teammate's head, or in a Google Doc nobody has opened since onboarding.

Engineers already have an answer: a `SKILL.md` file committed to the repo. It works, but it sits behind a pull request, so the people who hold the most operational knowledge, your editors and marketers, cannot touch it. So we added a **skill** document type to the Studio.

## What a CMS skill is

A skill is a simple document:

- a `title`
- a `slug`
- a `description`
- and a `content` body written in Markdown

Editors author it in the Studio, and any agent connected through the Sanity MCP can read it while it works.

The trick is progressive disclosure. An agent first scans the `title` and `description` of every skill, decides which ones are relevant to the request in front of it, then loads the full `content` of the few that matter. That keeps context lean, and it makes the `description` the most important field you write. Treat it as a trigger, something like "Use when writing any prose for the site," not a summary.

![Screenshot of a skill document in the SanityPress Studio backend](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/cyu7k2r0/production/643e770855214618d03c824ce40aa0463682cb7e-3082x2216.png)

## Five skills worth adding to this starter

Skills earn their keep when they capture what an agent cannot guess. Five that pay off quickly in SanityPress:

### Brand voice and style

Tone, reading level, and the punctuation rules your copy lives by.

### CSS and design tokens

Your three layers of styling, the `--color-*` and `--font-*` variables, and the class names worth restyling, like `.action` and `.eyebrow`.

### Module selection guide

When to reach for modules like `hero.cover` versus `hero.split` or `card-list` versus `step-list` versus `accordion-list`. A vague request becomes the right building blocks. **[Browse the modules](/modules)**

### Page composition

One `h1` per page in the hero, a sensible heading hierarchy, and a default order for sections.

### SEO and metadata

Keep titles within 60 characters and descriptions within 160, and know when a page should be set to `noIndex`.

## Using a skill in the Studio

Once a skill exists, you point an agent at it by its slug. From the Studio, using the Sanity MCP or Content Agent, a prompt can look like this:

```sh
code:/content-guidelines Write the intro for this page in two short paragraphs, following our voice and punctuation rules
```

The agent loads that skill, follows it, and applies the same rules every time, with no one re-explaining them.

## Skills are how your company works, written down

Sanity's own team makes the larger case in **[their recent blog post on how they author skills](https://www.sanity.io/blog/skills-are-how-your-company-works)**. A skill is not just a trick for better React code; it is operational knowledge written down for agents to act on.

The moment you treat that knowledge as content, you get the things a folder of Markdown does not give you for free: an owner, an audit trail through document revisions, governance over who can publish, and a clean path to distribute updates. Sanity built an internal Skills Studio so non-engineers can author and govern skills, then sync them out to every agent the company uses.

Add a few skills and the agent workflows this starter is known for stop guessing and start following your conventions. The knowledge that used to live in one person's head now lives somewhere an agent can pick it up and use.

![90s Japanese office space inside a cubicle. the large sword is taking so much space and spilling his coffee on his paperwork](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/cyu7k2r0/production/3059ede8f8ed950b32e087bbdc523282f2e89b19-1448x1086.png)