Skills & Plays
The three layers: Playbook, Play, Skill, and how they relate.
Three layers, one rule: a Playbook delivers an outcome, a Play does one stage of it, a Skill is a Play worth keeping.
Playbook
The service. A chain of orchestrated stages that, when run, delivers a finished outcome. The Competitor Intel Report template is one Playbook, and "a decision-ready competitor report" is its outcome. Playbooks are what you build, run, and publish.
Play
One atomic stage inside a Playbook. Each Play is a small document of its own: what it does, the inputs it consumes, what it hands to the next stage. The URL SEO Audit template runs as two Plays: research the page, then write the prioritised audit. They execute in order, each one visible in the run folder afterwards.
A Play can pin the model it runs on; otherwise routing picks a sensible one for the kind of work.
Because every Play's output is kept per run, you can always see what each stage contributed: glass box, not black box.
Skill
A reusable unit in your account's Skill library. Importing a Skill drops it into a Playbook as a Play, and reuse flows the other way without a publish step: your account's Playbooks are scanned as a library, so a good authored Play surfaces as reusable in your next Playbook automatically. Your account starts with the system Skills that power the seed templates: research, report-writing and their kin, so a fresh account can run every template in the gallery.
How they compose
- Build a Playbook → add Plays (authored directly, or imported from Skills).
- A Play proves itself → it's already reusable: the library scans your Playbooks, so the Play surfaces for import in the next one.
- The Playbook's Persona and Rules cascade into every Play at runtime, so the document's absolutes bind each stage: one rule written once, enforced everywhere.