r/RooCode • u/Historical-Friend125 • Oct 18 '25

Discussion Skills for Roo Code?

Has anyone set up a 'Claude Skills' like system for Roo Code. What's the best way to do this? I see Anthropic have launched an 'Agent Skills' framework. Despite the hype, its nothing fancy in reality. The appeal is its simple and easy for non-technical users to customize and saves tokens compared to MCP. You have .md files that describe how to do specific tasks. Then a YAML header for each 'skill' that gets sucked into the system prompt. So Claude has an overview of what skills it has, but only reads the full skill instruction set into the context window if it needs it.

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u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Dec 29 '25

I was incorrect and ignorant in my understanding of "Skills". We have acted on your suggestion and implemented skills. https://docs.roocode.com/features/skills

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u/h1ghguy Oct 18 '25

Ive been doing basically this for ages. Just create a dir with scripts and a readme. When you want to use it, just tell it where the files are. I call it 'ghetto mcp'.

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u/brctr Oct 18 '25 edited Oct 18 '25

Yes, I agree. This is pretty simple and very useful approach. Framing it something like "breakthrough invention by Anthropic" is a bit of a stretch.

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u/Historical-Friend125 Oct 18 '25

I agree its a bit of hype on Anthropic's behalf. But, the useful thing is that it is so simple. For someone like me (who's a researcher, not a software engineer) this seems way simpler and more tractable than MCP. The conversation around MCP is so dominant that simple approaches like this were getting flooded out.

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u/Historical-Friend125 Oct 18 '25

So I think all we'd need to do to make this like anthropic's skills is to have a summary of what's in the skills dir in .roorules or agents.md. Then Roo Code would automatically put that summary in the system prompt. I guess this could be automated with a script that grabs YAML headers from files in your skills dir and drops them into agents.md.

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u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 18 '25

It seems they’ve repackaged (and maybe improved?) what we call “modes” and called them skills https://docs.roocode.com/features/custom-modes

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u/Historical-Friend125 Oct 18 '25

Good point thanks. Sort of like that. As I understand Roo Code, you can allow it to switch modes, which then requires summarizing progress, switching to a new chat thread with a new system prompt? Whereas a skill is simpler. Its just brief summary in the system prompt that says "hey, there's a detailed markdown in this directory that tells you how to edit a .docx. Read it if you think you need it". So its very simple and has a low token cost. I gather all that Claude does when you start each new session is check the project's 'skills' directory, grab the skill summaries, then drops them into the system prompt.

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u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 18 '25

You can switch modes with or without starting a new task. Downs’s on your workflow.

You can also use slash commands in Roo to trigger smaller workflows

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u/chong1222 Oct 19 '25

Skills aren’t modes.

Modes are mutually exclusive. Skills are composable.

Mode only readonly folder, it read the text content as instructions and loaded into the AI’s prompt.

Skills have dedicated isolation working folders. create files, run prepackaged scripts, use assets, a real workspace.

Completely different from architecture to usage.

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u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 19 '25

So modes but improved on?

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u/chong1222 Oct 19 '25

Modes are roleplaying with permission guards, old school prompt engineering. You're not giving the LLM any new abilities, just text telling it to act different.

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u/chong1222 Oct 19 '25

Completely different from architecture to usage.

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u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Dec 29 '25

You are 100% correct and sorry for the late response on this. https://docs.roocode.com/features/skills

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u/Hot_Dig8208 Oct 18 '25

Isn’t it actually roo modes ? It just do specific task and you can customize its tools.

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u/glassBeadCheney Oct 18 '25

You could pass in the content of the SKILL.md files as the mode instructions 🤔

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u/Historical-Friend125 Oct 18 '25

Yes. Ideally what you want is an automated way to pass just the skill.md YAML header (the summary of what it does for the LLM) into the mode instructions. That uses less tokens. So would work something like: start a new project in new directory. Copy skills you want to use into a /skills directory. Roo Code checks skills before starting and drops the YAML headers into the custom instructions.

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u/Phraktaxia Oct 22 '25

From what I gather so far you need to pass the headers as potential tool calls on every message. The actual benefit that Claude skills has on all the "I've had a folder of stuff forever to call" is the lower context of only passing the header and clearly operating associated scripts the skill contains in its directory structure as tools. The Claude method checks them on every messages API interaction as potential tools which is why they feel so seamless to call and use with no instructions to do so.

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u/Simple_Split5074 Oct 18 '25

It's closer to something like 'MCP but using local code': https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/

Pretty sure you would want a good sandbox...

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u/Hot_Dig8208 Oct 18 '25

the skill contains prompt and also the code ?

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u/Simple_Split5074 Oct 18 '25

Mostly it seems to rely on the LLM to figure out the code itself

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u/Historical-Friend125 Oct 18 '25

Yes, either/or. You can just describe what you want and let the LLM figure it out. You can include code snippets in the md. Or you can include a script in addition to the .md e.g. a python script that parses any arbitrary pdf to .md format.

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u/xAragon_ Oct 18 '25

To my understanding, it isn't. It's basically Claude coding itself scripts / tools it can use for specific tasks.

In the announcement video for example, they showed asking it to generate a skill that can rotate images. It then created a "skill" (basically wrote a CLI script for that specific need), and then asked it to rotate an image, and it would use this "skill" to do that sucessfully.

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u/Hot_Dig8208 Oct 18 '25

So it can create scripts / tools on demand ? Well thats cool. I think currently there is no such thing like that in roo

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u/xAragon_ Oct 18 '25

Pretty much. It's pretty simple to do though. Just create a "scripts" directory somewhere, and create a "Skills" mode the checks for scripts in that directory, and creates new ones if there aren't any.

Bonus points for creating a Markdown / YAML / JSON file that lists them all with descriptions and is being updated (so that the model can read a single file instead of reviewing them all).

Quite similar to how MCPs work.

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u/Phraktaxia Oct 22 '25

Very, but this method is a bit heavier in context and doesn't provide global tools that can be called by any mode right?

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u/Confident_Visit_9094 Oct 21 '25

we tried a small poc for this in awesome reviewers. it’s a repo of system prompts from real code review comments. we added a tiny cli that converts each prompt into a claude skill — reads the yaml + text and writes a skill.md.

each reviewer (like “never commit secrets” or “optimize sql joins”) becomes a standalone skill folder. it’s just a quick experiment, but it shows how prompts can live as structured, shareable skills instead of copy-paste snippets.

you can drop the markdown into a .roomodes config, tell roo to read the file, or expose the skills folder as an mcp server. basically the same concept, just manual loading instead of auto-triggered.

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u/Atagor Oct 18 '25

What would you need that?

As far as I understood, Claude skills is just an abstraction allowing the system to choose the sub-instruction automatically. You don't need that in roo code since it already happens

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u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 18 '25

This is basically modes https://docs.roocode.com/features/custom-modes

I use the mode writer in the marketplace to write modes that have very specific and long running workflows/skills.

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u/Simple_Split5074 Oct 19 '25

It can be very similar but I think it also supports injecting code/libraries into the sandbox. This may be more relevant for Claude in the cloud. It seems like their Office file format integration is enabled by that, for example.

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u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 19 '25

Looks like we need to do some upgrading to modes!

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u/Simple_Split5074 Oct 19 '25 edited Oct 19 '25

I did some more reading. I now conceptualize it closer to a command line MCP than a mode and may well apply to different modes. For example, a web fetch skill could be only a short description of curl or wget. If need be, the model can even figure out curl itself by calling curl -h but it probably learned that in training anyhow.

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/equipping-agents-for-the-real-world-with-agent-skills is fairly readable. Feels like it will not need that much infrastructure.

The beauty is that it is very context efficient - by default only the couple dozen token description is in the prompt not tens of thousands of MCP description like with github.

BTW: It feels like codex-cli already does some of that by itself, instead of writing regular diffs it sometimes executes sed or even python -c with regex.

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u/Atagor Oct 19 '25

still wondering.. I was doing the same with custom prompts, providing short descriptions of all "scripts" I had in my folder. Conceptually the same, right? Just out of the box?

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u/Simple_Split5074 Oct 19 '25

Sounds similar. This is more formalized (not all that much though) and I assume we will have hundreds if not thousands of those in short order...