# New skill

Source: https://docs.tightly.io/help/ask/new-skill
Reviewed: 2026-09-07

## The question this page answers

How does a skill get written, and where does what it builds appear? Write a skill is a conversation with Ask Tightly beside the skill it is building. You tell Ask Tightly what you are tired of doing by hand; it asks what it would otherwise guess at, builds the skill as a sequence of steps, shows what it would do on today's desk, and saves it on the shortest rope, Tells you.

## What you see

The head is Write a skill, with a badge that reads Draft, not saved until the skill is saved and its state and version after. The basis line reads Today · dry run once there are steps to run. Skills is the door back, and once the draft is saved a second door, named after the skill, opens its page.

The conversation is the Ask Tightly panel, opened and pinned to this page's conversation when you arrive; the page starts it for you with its opening line. The main is the skill as it is built. Sequence lists the steps in order, with the figures each would produce if it ran now; until a turn has drafted anything it reads Nothing drafted yet. Beside it, once there are steps and the main is wide enough, stand two cards. Applies to is the dry run on today's desk, with Style, Cover, Reorder and Would (Stage, Park or Leave), and Re-check today to run it again. How far it goes shows the four rungs and what the first move up will want: Cases, Fires (Not measured on a draft) and Next rung, which reads Ten cases, thirty days, nine agreements in ten.

## What to do

Describe the job in one sentence, as you would to a colleague. Answer the questions Ask Tightly asks back: the ceiling it may not spend past, the fields it may change, the judgement it should hold. Watch the sequence fill and the dry run say what a run would do today; correct it in the conversation and the draft is rebuilt. Every worked example and correction in the conversation is kept as one of the skill's cases when it is saved.

Save it from the conversation when it reads right. The chip is Save as a draft skill, and its confirm names the skill and says it is saved at Tells you and runs nothing until it is published. Saving writes the draft and runs nothing; the receipt carries a back test against the event ledger's last 90 days where the skill is fired by an event, and the result of running its cases. Publishing is a separate press on the skill's own page, behind the Skills door. Every run of the skill executes as the person who saved it.

## When it is empty or failed

> Ask Tightly could not start the conversation just now.

with Try again, where the conversation could not be created. A conversation this account cannot read prints

> This conversation could not be read just now.

in place of the skill, with Try again. A draft that is not complete is refused at the save with the reason naming what is missing, and the conversation keeps going until it is whole. Nothing on this page posts to the Skills list directly, and nothing publishes.