skills

Discover IXO skill capsules — the caller’s published private skills first, then the public registry.

Source: packages/oracle-runtime/src/plugins/skills/

Attribute	Value
Visibility	always
Stability	stable
Category	data
Default state	On
Depends on	sandbox (hard dep — see below)

Summary

Discover IXO skill capsules. Both list_skills and search_skills mint an ixo:skills UCAN invocation per call so the registry surfaces the caller’s own published private skills alongside public ones. When minting fails the tools degrade to public-only — they never throw on auth issues. Pairs with sandbox for execution (see Plugin vs Skill).

Environment variables

Var	Required	Description
SKILLS_CAPSULES_BASE_URL	no	Defaults to https://capsules.skills.ixo.earth.
NETWORK	no	Read but not owned (declared by the core base env schema). Forwarded as X-IXO-Network.

Depends on

Hard-depends on sandbox — skill execution runs through sandbox_run, which sandbox owns (listing/search is HTTP-only). But sandbox is auto-detect (SANDBOX_MCP_URL) and off by default, while skills is on by default. If sandbox is not loaded — e.g. SANDBOX_MCP_URL is unset — the loader cascades skills off silently (a boot.plugin.cascaded_off warning), it does not fail boot. A true boot failure only occurs if sandbox is removed from the plugin set entirely while skills still requires it.

What it contributes

• Tools: list_skills, search_skills.
• Sub-agents: none.
• Middleware: none.
• HTTP routes: none.
• Shared state: none.

Opt out / Opt in

const app = await createOracleApp({
  config,
  features: { skills: false }, // never load
  // features: { skills: true }, // force load (default)
});

When to use it

• User asks “what skills are available?” or “what can you do?”.
• User asks the agent to find a skill for a specific task (“a skill for invoices”, “is there a skill for KYC?”).
• Before running a skill via the sandbox, list or search to obtain its cid and path.

When NOT to use it

• Executing a skill — that goes through sandbox (sandbox_run), not the skills tools.
• General web search — use firecrawl.

Where to read next

Plugin vs Skill

Why skills discovers and sandbox executes.

Declare dependencies

Pattern used here to require sandbox.