compose-skill

Compose Skill Workflow

You are turning a recurring multi-tool chain into one named session skill. A skill is a step list — each step is a tool call whose result the next step can reference — that the runtime exposes as a single MCP tool to downstream agents. Done well, it collapses three or four agent turns into one.

Vocabulary note. "Skill" here is the runtime concept (a chained tool sequence stored in the session, defined via elliot_create_skill). It is NOT a SKILL.md file like the one you are reading — those are workflow guides for you, the agent. Don't conflate them.

When a skill is worth composing

Compose a skill when all of these are true:

1. The job-to-be-done always needs ≥ 2 tool calls, in the same order.
2. The first tool's output feeds the second's parameters (e.g. "look up the customer id, then summarise their orders").
3. The downstream agent's prompt does not need to see the intermediate results — only the final answer.

If the agent often branches between two different second-step tools based on the first tool's output, that's a workflow, not a deterministic chain — but it can still be a connector skill. Author it as a prose skill: call elliot_create_skill with instructions (markdown describing the workflow, branches and all) and when_to_use, and leave steps empty. On export it becomes a SKILL.md guide alongside the connector's tools — exactly like the hand-written guides Elliot ships for itself. A skill may carry both steps (the happy-path chain) and instructions (the surrounding judgement).

Steps

1. Confirm the chain

Call elliot_list_tools to see what's registered. Identify the exact tool ids the chain uses and read each with elliot_get_tool(tool_id) to confirm its parameters and what it returns.

2. Sketch the steps

For each step, decide:

• alias — short name you'll reference the result by (e.g. customer, orders).
• tool_id — the registered tool's id.
• params — the literal parameter dict. To thread a field of an earlier step's first result row into this one, reference it by {{ steps.<alias>.<field> }} — e.g. a step aliased customer exposes its first row's id as {"user_id": "{{ steps.customer.id }}"}. This is the exact binding the runtime resolves; {{ customer.rows[0].id }} and other shapes are not valid and fail with SKILL_TEMPLATE_UNRESOLVED.