Skills & Plugins

Skills and Plugins allow you to customize Orbicus with domain-specific knowledge, project-level rules, and reusable workflow procedures.


Architectural Concepts

Orbicus defines procedural extensions through two mechanisms:

  • Skills: Modular, human-readable prompt recipes written in Markdown (SKILL.md). They teach the agent exact procedures for specialized tasks—such as executing database migrations, analyzing cyclomatic complexity, or generating changelogs.
  • Plugins: Bundled packages that combine multiple skills, MCP connectors, and configuration presets into a single installable unit.

Skills checked into your repository's .skills/ directory are tracked in version control, ensuring consistent agent behavior across all developers on your team.


Authoring Custom Skills

You can create a custom skill by placing a SKILL.md file inside your project's .skills/<skill-name>/ directory:

---
name: database-migration
description: Enforces team guidelines for creating and verifying SQL database migrations.
---

When the user requests a database migration:
1. Inspect existing schema files in `src/db/schema/`.
2. Generate an incremental migration file in `src/db/migrations/` using timestamped naming.
3. Include both `up` and `down` migration scripts.
4. Run `npm run db:test-migration` and verify execution before completing the task.

Skill Structure

  • Frontmatter: Defines the skill name and a concise description. Orbicus uses the description to automatically load the skill when a relevant prompt is submitted.
  • Workflow Instructions: Concrete step-by-step instructions guiding how the model should reason, which files to inspect, and what verification steps to run.

Managing Installed Plugins

Under Settings $\rightarrow$ Plugins, you can inspect and manage your active plugin ecosystem:

  1. Built-in Presets: Quickly toggle built-in packages like Code Quality Analyzers, Documentation Generators, and Security Auditors.
  2. Third-Party Plugins: Install plugins distributed as git repositories or npm packages.
  3. Mounted Connectors: Inspect any MCP servers or external tools bundled inside an installed plugin.