Author your first skill

The skill library is the heart of H.O.T-Jarvis: the assistant writes its own new abilities, tests them, and reuses them. This tutorial takes you through creating one from a plain request.

1. Open the Skills tab

Press Ctrl+2 (or use the Ctrl+K command palette and jump to Skills). You’ll see the library — empty at first.

2. Ask for a skill

In the authoring box at the top, describe an ability in plain language:

count the words in the input

Click Author. Behind the scenes, the assistant:

1. Writes a small script (fn run(input)) and a test (fn test()).
2. Runs the test in a sandbox.
3. If the test fails, feeds the error back to the model and tries again (up to three attempts).

3. Read the result

When the test passes, the skill lands in your library with a ✓ passed badge. If the model never produces a working version, the skill is saved but flagged and refuses to run — H.O.T-Jarvis never uses a skill it can’t prove works.

Note

On a small local model (like llama3.2) some drafts get flagged — that’s the harness doing its job, not a failure. A larger free model (e.g. Groq’s 70B) one-shots most requests. Either way, nothing untested runs.

4. Run it

Select the skill, type an input, and press Run. You’ll get the output, and the run is recorded in the event log.

5. See it improve itself

Every save, test, and run is logged. After enough activity, the reflection pass distills lessons (“re-test after a failure”, “avoid this pattern”) that ride along in future authoring — so the library gets better at making skills over time.

What just happened

You created a versioned, sandboxed, self-tested ability from one sentence. The full contract is in the skill manifest reference.