What is a Play?

A Play on YAMO is one numbered step inside a Playbook. It is a small document that says what that step does, what it receives from the step before it, what it hands to the step after it, and which tools and reference files it is allowed to reach for. A Playbook is an ordered list of Plays, and running the Playbook means running them in order.

Plays are why you can see inside the work rather than only its result. Each one keeps what it produced, so after a run you can read the second step's output and the first step's research separately, and tell which one went wrong.

What one Play declares

Every Play file states the same things, whether it was written by hand or imported from a reusable Skill.

• Its position. Which numbered stage it is.
• Its name and title. The short identifier, and the human sentence.
• Its input and its output. What it expects to be handed, and what it promises to produce.
• Its tools. The Connectors this step may call. A Play with an empty list calls none.
• Its references. The Reference files it reads.
• Whether it pauses. A Play may declare a human approval gate, which stops the run and waits for a decision before anything with an outside effect happens.

Everything below that is instructions, in plain markdown. That is the part that describes the work.

Play, Skill, or Run?

Three words sit close together here.

• A Play is a step in the definition. It is reusable, it belongs to the Playbook, and it holds nobody's data.
• A Skill is a reusable step kept in your account's Skill library. Importing one into a Playbook creates a Play from it. So a Skill is where a step comes from; a Play is what it becomes.
• A Run is one execution. A Play is not a Run: the Play is the instruction, the Run is the occasion it was carried out.

A real one

URL SEO Audit runs as two Plays. The first is called audit-page, titled "Research the page": it takes the URL from the run inputs and produces research notes on how the page presents in search and what it competes against. The second is draft-audit, "Write the audit": it takes those notes and produces the finished, prioritised report.

Neither declares any tools. Neither pauses for approval. The whole method is two documents.

What to read next

• What is a Playbook? for the thing they sit inside.
• Play for the one-sentence version.
• Build for how Plays are added and edited.