Agent skills (sometimes called recipes) are specialized instructions that guide how the Mindsmith Agent generates, formats, and edits your content. Think of them as behavioral guidelines that tell the Mindsmith Agent exactly how to approach your lesson design.
By applying different skills, you can force the Mindsmith Agent to keep content extremely brief, prevent it from rewriting compliance documents, or instruct it to turn a video into an interactive simulation.
Using Built-in Skills
Mindsmith comes with several built-in skills tailored for common instructional design scenarios. You can access these anytime you are interacting with the Mindsmith Agent.
To apply a skill, open the Mindsmith Agent and click the skills button to expand the skill tray. Select the skill you want to use, and it will remain active for your generation or editing session.
Here are some of the most popular built-in skills you can use:
Micro Learning: Forces the Mindsmith Agent to keep pages incredibly short. It restricts pages to a maximum of 1-2 tiles, ensuring the content takes no more than 20 seconds to consume.
Convert Document: Transforms your uploaded documents into standard Mindsmith tiles (like text tiles, image tiles, and list tiles) while strictly preserving the original wording.
Verbatim: Strictly imports document content exactly as written, without adding any interactive tiles or generating new images. This is perfect for legal and compliance training.
Video Content: Analyzes a video and extracts key segments, creates supporting text, and pulls visual frames (like presentation slides or charts) into image tiles to build a comprehensive lesson.
Video Simulation: Converts an uploaded video into a fully interactive branching experience or software simulation.
Outline: Imports your uploaded outline directly into the storyboard, using your headings to establish the page structure without expanding on the text.
Needs Analysis: Instructs the Mindsmith Agent to hold off on generating content and instead ask you targeted questions about your audience, goals, and constraints.
Creating Custom Skills
If you have specific formatting requirements, brand guidelines, or unique pedagogical approaches, you can create your own custom skills.
Open the Mindsmith Agent and expand the skills tray.
Click the + Create skill button at the top of the tray.
Enter a Skill name and a short Description so you know what the skill does at a glance.
In the Prompt box, type your specific instructions for the Mindsmith Agent (up to 5,000 characters).
Click Save to add the skill to your personal "My Skills" list.
Pro Tip: When writing a custom skill prompt, be explicit about the tile types you want to see. For example, instead of saying "make it interactive," say "Use accordion tiles for definitions and a flashcards tile for review."
Sharing Skills with Your Organization
If you are an Organization Admin, you can create standardized skills and share them with your entire team. This is a great way to ensure all authors adhere to your company's instructional design standards.
To share a skill, create a new skill or edit an existing one. In the dialog box, check the Publish to organization box before clicking save.
Once published, this skill will appear under the "Org Skills" category in the skill tray for every member of your workspace. If you are not an Org Admin, this checkbox will be disabled, and you will need to contact your administrator to publish a skill globally.
Managing Your Custom Skills
You can easily update or remove the custom skills you have created.
To manage your skills, open the skills tray and hover your mouse over the custom skill you want to modify.
Click the pencil icon to open the editor and update the name, description, or prompt.
Click the trash icon to delete the skill permanently.
Please note that you can only edit or delete your own custom skills. If a skill is published to the organization, only an Org Admin can edit or delete it. Deleting an organizational skill will remove it from the tray for all workspace members.