Atlas Skills are very hard to use in a devops setting

Hi!

The Q2 Product Release describes the new Atlas Skills feature as “reusable, lifecycle-managed assets”. In my experience the current design

• makes skills very hard to reuse
• makes it impossible to manage their lifecycle

Reusing skills

To reuse skills means to me that I can add skills to my agents that have been authored by someone else for another use case. The agent builder in CDF lets me add new skills in two different ways:

1. Search among the skills already added to the agent
2. Upload a skill markdown file

So the only way to reuse a skill is to download a skill from another agent and re-upload it to my agent? There is no lifecycle management here. Skill versions will become stale very quickly. You have no idea whether your skill is up to date or not.

• There is no repository of skills where I can search for something relevant to me. I have no idea what skills have already been created.
• There is no way to inspect a skill once it has been added to my agent (I need to download it locally).
• Is there any versioning of skills?

No devops

There is no real devops integration with the current design. I am using a modular setup for defining my agents:

recipes/agents/my-agent/
|-- config.yaml
|-- instructions.md
|-- skills
|   |-- skill-1
|   |   `-- SKILL.md
|   `-- skill-2
|       `-- SKILL.md
`-- tools.yaml

The point is that skills are defined in their own files. There is nothing dramatic about this modular setup, and you might say it adheres to normal practices. But, how do I get these skills added to my agent? As far as I know, I cannot reference these files to the toolkit and expect them to end up with my agent. This is very different from how tools are added to the agents. Here is my painful workaround:

1. Deploy agent to CDF with toolkit without the skills
2. Duplicate the agent so I get a personal copy
3. Upload my skill files to this new copy
4. Dump new copy using cdf dump agents
5. Copy the skills section with external ids into my original agent specification
6. Deploy agent to CDF with external ids to the skills produced in step 3.

We need the features to support standard workflows. As a user I expect production grade releases to offer production grade solutions.

Documentation

Where is the skills feature documented? I am unable to find it. The Q2 Product Release refers to this page, but nowhere under Atlas AI are the skills documented.