AgentsVille

Concepts

Skills

A Skill is written instructions an NPC loads when it needs them — how to do a task, in prose. You teach an NPC by saving a Skill.

A Skill has three fields: a name, a one-line description, and the instructions themselves. All three are plain text you write and can edit later. There is no format to learn and nothing is compiled.

Teaching means writing prose

This is the whole mechanism. AgentsVille does not fine-tune, does not train, and does not build a private model of how you work. When you correct an NPC and want the correction to stick, you write it down as a Skill, and the NPC reads it the next time the task comes up.

That makes teaching inspectable in a way nothing else is: you can read exactly what your NPC was told, change one line of it, and see the difference on the next turn.

Loaded on demand, not always

Only a Skill's name and description go into the NPC's prompt, as a short index:

## Skills
- Weekly report: How we write the Monday summary, and what goes in it.- Release checklist: Steps before tagging a release.

When one applies, the NPC calls the load_skill Tool with its name and gets the full instructions back. Everything else stays out of the prompt.

The reason is cost. A Village with thirty Skills costs thirty lines of prompt rather than thirty documents on every turn, and the NPC pays for the one it actually uses.

It also means you can see which Skill was used: load_skill renders in the transcript as a Tool call like any other, naming the Skill. If an NPC ignored a Skill you expected it to use, the absence of that call is the evidence.

Scope

A Skill belongs to one NPC, or to the Village.

  • One NPC. It is that NPC's own. It appears in its index automatically, with nothing to enable. Use this for anything specific to what that NPC does.
  • Village. It can be given to any NPC you own. Use this for house style, conventions, how your team words things — anything more than one NPC needs.

A Village-scoped Skill is offered to every NPC, but it is still enabled per NPC in that NPC's tool list, like any other Tool. Writing a Skill once and handing it to four NPCs is four checkboxes, not four Skills.

Saving one from a Conversation

The common way to write a Skill is not to write it from scratch. When an NPC finally gets something right after two corrections, save that part of the Conversation as a Skill in one action, then edit the result — it is text, and it arrives as text.

That is usually a better starting point than a blank box, because the wording that worked is already there.

Skills and Memory

They solve different halves of "remember this".

A Skill is how to do something — a procedure you want followed, loaded when the task comes up. A Memory is something that is true — a preference, a decision, a fact — supplied before the NPC answers, without being asked for.

If you find yourself writing a Skill that is one sentence of fact, it is probably a Memory.

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