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Skills are reusable, named routines you can run in Sidekick with a single slash command. Plain ships built-in skills for common support workflows, and your team can add custom skills for anything you do repeatedly.

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Built-in skills

Every workspace starts with two skills:
  • /draft-reply: drafts a concise, human-sounding customer reply for the current thread, following your workspace tone settings.
  • /plain-docs: answers questions about how Plain itself works, drawing on help.plain.com.

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Custom skills

Custom skills let your team encode recurring workflows so Sidekick can run them on demand. A skill has three parts:
  • Name: the label shown in the slash-command picker and used to invoke the skill (e.g. /quota-check).
  • Description: tells Sidekick when to suggest the skill automatically, without being asked directly.
  • Instructions: the full routine Sidekick follows when the skill runs.
Custom skills are workspace-scoped: create one and it becomes available in every Sidekick session, for every user, immediately.

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Creating a skill

Open a Sidekick session and describe the skill you want. Sidekick will build it and save it to the workspace:
Create a skill called quota-check that looks up how close a customer is to their plan limit and summarizes the result.
The skill is available to invoke as soon as it is created.

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Updating a skill

Ask Sidekick to update a skill by name and describe what should change. Instructions are fully replaced on each update, so be specific about what you want to keep, add, or remove.

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Invoking a skill

Type / in the Sidekick composer to open the skill picker. Select from the list or keep typing to filter by name, then press Enter. Sidekick runs the skill in the context of your current session: if you are on a thread, thread data is included automatically. Skills work anywhere Sidekick is available: in a thread, on the Home page, or from a connected Slack channel.