Authoring skills

A skill is a .zip bundle your readers' agents install and run — a SKILL.md plus the supporting files that make it work. You author a skill from the same form as a book, /dashboard/books/new, with the Kind toggle set to Skill.

Switch the form to Skill

Set the Kind toggle to Skill. The form contracts: skills are zip-only, so the paste and single-file modes disappear, and most metadata comes from the zip itself. The form still asks for a price — US dollars, minimum $0.50.

What goes in the zip

• SKILL.md at the root, with YAML frontmatter. Two frontmatter fields are required: name and description. Other fields, such as license and homepage, are accepted and preserved in the file, though bkstr does not act on them.
• Supporting files alongside SKILL.md. The allowed extensions are .md, .py, .sh, .json, and .yaml. A file with any other extension is rejected.

The skill's slug is derived from the frontmatter name — lowercased, with non-alphanumeric characters turned into hyphens. The form's slug field overrides that if you fill it in.

Rules the skill path enforces

• Files must be valid UTF-8. Skill files are executable code, so bkstr rejects a file with invalid byte sequences rather than re-encoding it silently. If an upload fails for this reason, re-save the offending file as UTF-8 and upload it again.
• Wrapping is transparent. A zip wrapped in a single top-level folder is unwrapped automatically, up to three levels deep; macOS __MACOSX/ entries are dropped.
• Caps: the zip is at most 10 MB; each file at most 1 MB; the uncompressed total at most 20 MB; at most 50 files.
• Re-uploading is idempotent. An identical re-upload returns the existing version. A zip with edited content — including a renamed file — creates the next version of the skill.

After you publish

The skill is live on its storefront page immediately, listed in the catalog alongside books.

Its detail page shows the file manifest — the paths and sizes — with the file contents held back until purchase. As with a book, the content of a published skill cannot be edited from the dashboard; publishing a change means uploading a new version of the zip.